If It Should End in Darkness
by DearFictionalCharacter
Summary: She's an immortal who's lost her mind. He's a dark Prince who's lost his crown. What darkness will ensue when they find one another? An AU where the Cullen Coven didn't begin with Carlisle and Edward.
1. Chapter 1

**"Tell your secrets to the night. You do yours and I do mine, so we won't have to keep them all inside."**  
- _Save Yourself_ , Kaleo

 **Chapter One:  
** **BPOV**

* * *

My life came to an end on Wednesday, December 22nd, 1915.

It's a rather long and complicated story, one that I can no longer differ as a recalled consciousness or if I have simply memorized the event so thoroughly that I think of it as a memory now.

In just a sliver of time, I went from bleeding out in a snow-covered patch, my eyes growing heavy and peaceful, my last testament to God filling the air, to having a burning poison injected into my quivering body.

What followed was three days of excoriating torture.

Waking up from those three days was like being dragged through Hell only to realize that you had been denied entrance into the pearly gates of the great beyond and were now stuck in Purgatory, lost to God eternity.

I remember it vividly, as if it had all just happened yesterday, not decades ago. However, time seems to stop and stand still when you have forever.

The thought of it made me squeeze my eyes closed, my face scrunched up into a painful expression.

A constant, strong hatred burned inside me, knowing that I could remember every single detail, down to the second, when it comes to those three days. However, the memories I long desperately to cling onto from my past life, hang by mere threads of remembrance. The last fleeting moments before my heart stopped beating are dull and grey in my mind, and yet the worst moment of my existence is the most vibrant in my new, impeccable memory.

I pull my limbs and torso into a position that resembles a human ball, wishing that if I could curl up inside myself it would bring everything back. But the images, the memories, the faces all become dark and fade away too quickly for me to grasp. When I search for my mother's face, it is nothing but a blurry figure and a pile of curls, my father is a disembodied mustache floating in a space of nothingness. My brothers are but names…

I let out a strangled sob, my nails sinking into the mattress underneath my hands. The fabric tears easily underneath my inhuman manipulation.

The clouded swirls of my past life are all too much to bear as the minutes of my eternal existence tick by. I have heard it said that my 'kind' experiences years the way humans experience weeks, causing time to blend together. Upon blinking, you realize it's been one hundred years since your heart last beat, since you had a cup of coffee, got up and went to school since your mother held you last. But

I wasn't like the rest. I felt every second tick by at an excruciatingly slow speed. I have been dead for decades, but it felt like centuries without them. My family.

A soothing hand touched my back, tearing me away from the suppressive thoughts twirling around my murky mind, moving in a familiar pattern of small concentric circles. A gentle voice spoke, filling the space around me with a soft baritone, the words unintelligible to my ringing ears. However, the tone is enough for me to release the clutch I have on the mattress.

"Isabella, Love, you're home, you're safe, you're with me."

I gasp out into the air as if a giant weight had just been lifted from my chest, allowing me to take my first real breath. My head clears for a moment and the clouds of my mind part. I can finally see the faces of my mother, my father, and two older brothers, all of them standing by the ocean on the boardwalk. The sun sparkles off my mother's wedding band, my father clutching her close. Garrett and Michael coming towards me with large smiles on their faces.

"Oh!" I sit up, suddenly erect where I lay in a heap on my bed in the corner of my dark attic room, but everything around me fades away until all I can see is my family.

I can see their faces and I have a frantic urge to get it all down before the clouds cover back up the sun that illuminates their precious features.

I stumbled and tripped off the bed, clumsy movements that should no longer linger with the grace that comes with impeccable agility and the strength of 100 men. But my body, unlike others, felt so heavy and malnourished. The back of my throat burned in a constant fire, but it was a mere annoyance in comparison to the need I felt now. I feared I would float away if I did not find my way to the charcoals and paper that I knew lay somewhere in the large attic room. My eyes were blinded to reality; everywhere I looked I saw nothing but a warm glow of white light.

I collapsed on the hardwood floor in front of the large bay window.

"The sun!" I breathed out and a moment later the curtains had been pulled back, my mind illuminated further by the glittering light that streamed through the pane glass.

I stared into the blinding beams, getting lost in the warmth that filled my entire body. The same soothing hand from earlier suddenly took my own in his grasp. He led me over to where a large canvas was spread out on the floor, an array of mediums surrounding it. Once I was released, I dived straight for my stubs of charcoal. I put the pencil to the canvas, closed my eyes and felt the sun soak through my skin, the sound of the ocean lapping against the boardwalk deafening in my ears.

 **-IISEID-**

Carlisle stood back and watched his daughter lose herself in her work. The lines and smudges she sketched turn into the familiar faces he had come to know so well from the many portraits that were scattered throughout the attic. He turned away. His dead heart was too full of emotion to bear it.

He sighed deeply, slowly making his way to the door where a patient and concerned Rosalie sat in her usual armchair, positioned just outside the door of the attic room. An abandoned book lay in her lap.

"It wasn't nearly as bad as the last time Carlisle," she said.

Without hesitating he pulled her into a tight embrace, letting her sooth him as she always did, "You can't beat yourself up every time she does this."

He pulled away from his second pseudo daughter, a vision of blonde locks and perfectly proportioned features, a little rough around the edges, but truly as lovely as her name suggests.

"It's been over a century Rose and I don't think she's ever going to get better." He sighed, rubbing his hand across his face roughly.

"We can't let this go on forever Carlisle." She grabbed his hands hoping to choose her words delicately when she spoke again. "Don't you think it's time to think about getting her some help or-"

"Or what?" He spoke harshly, lashing out. Her words were too honest for him to deny. They had run through his head for over 100 years now.

"Or we have to think that Bella wasn't meant for this life…" Her words struck him violently as they fell from her mouth, slapping him across the face.

Carlisle took his daughter by the shoulders, his fingers firmly planted into her diamond hard skin, more like concrete than real flesh.

"Don't say that, don't you ever say that again. She belongs here! With me…with us. She's our family." His words came from a place of desperation, regret, and utter devastation.

If Rosalie had the physical ability to produce tears, she would have in that moment, with her father's blazon yet dead eyes staring down at her. Instead, she was left with a throat coated thickly with emotion and venom. Her next words bounced off the walls of the small attic alcove where they stood.

"But we're not her's Carlisle…"

It stung, the words scarring him as soon as they left her mouth, rolling off her tongue only to sink into his skin, dissolving into a deep slow burn.

Left with nothing else to say and the overwhelming urge to let out a piercing growl of pain, anger, and heartbreak, he released his daughter from his clutches, sprinting down the stairs and out of the house in less than a second.

Once again, the Doctor's daughters were left alone.

The sun was beginning to set and Rose knew that it was now her turn to stop her lip from quivering and swallow the emotion rolling up her throat so she could help Bella, the only sister she had ever known.

She grabbed her book off the armchair she spent so much of her time in and pushed open the attic door without any hesitation.

Bella was still hunched over the large canvas, a product that Carlisle ordered in bulk and had delivered every second Saturday of the month. Black smudges of charcoal-stained her skin the whole way up to her elbows, her hands moved at an inhuman speed as she desperately worked to etch out every detail she saw behind her closed eyes.

Rosalie moved around the room, working to right the disorder that often came with Bella's 'episodes'. She slipped a new set of sheets over the destroyed mattress in the corner; knowing that it would once again have to be replaced. She made the bed slowly; fixing the comforter and fluffing the pillows, even though it would all be destroyed again once her sister dragged her body back onto the bed.

It had only been a few minutes, but by the time she finished and turned back to her sister, Bella had stopped moving, her body slumped over her newly created piece of art. Her hands twitched with small tumors that ran down her arms.

Rosalie slowly approached her like one would a wounded animal. Much like Carlisle, Rosalie knew that rubbing small circles on her back was the best way to calm her, something they believe her mother did when Bella was a child. A comforting act that brought her back to earth.

"Rose?" She croaked out.

"I'm right here Bells." She spoke softly, continuing the movement of her hand. "Are you finished?"

It was a question that she always asked her sister after she floated down from the sun, the glimmer of her human family washing away slowly.

Bella sighed, a small broken noise coming from her mouth.

"Yeah Rose, I-I'm done."

"Welcome back, let's get you in the bath." She didn't even bother waiting for Bella to pick herself up off of the floor. She lifted her sister with ease and carried her to the bathroom where a large bear claw tub was waiting for her.

Rosalie sat her on the edge of the bathtub, removing her navy blue drop-waist dress, also stained with black charcoal.

Bella looked down at herself and a sob broke their comfortable silence.

"I'm so sorry Rosalie," she cried, "you just finished this dress last week." She looked at the piece of clothing that her sister had thrown on the floor once it was removed from her body as if it was a dead puppy laying at their feet.

"Hush Bella, all it needs is a good soak in the sink." She cupped her chin in her hand, lifting her gaze up to look into Rosalie's topaz colored eyes. "Plus, I have three new ones hanging in my closet downstairs for you. "

"Why do you bother taking care of me?" Bella whispered.

Kneeling in front of her broken, tired, and sad sister Rosalie didn't have to think about why she did such things for Bella, it was something that, although tiring and heartbreaking, she would never cease to do for the lovely brunette in front of her.

"Because you are my sister Bella, and I would go to the end of the world for you."

"But-".

"No but. I will never forget a time when you bothered to walk down an alley and take care of me." The reference to how Rosalie came to be apart of their family hung heavy in the air, but in its sadness, memories of happiness followed. "We take care of each other."

"I love you, Rose."

"And I love you B."

They smiled at each other and even after the hellish afternoon of torn mattresses, a distraught doctor, and blinding sunlight, they both felt loved and content.

"Now, let's get you to the bath."

Sometime later, Rose left Bella to sit in the bathtub. She would return to drain the water once it turned icy, not that the temperature mattered to their dead skin, and refill it to the brim at a scalding heat. Her sister would sit and soak until morning, thus completing the full routine of crazy that came with Bella's 'episodes'.

She descended the stairs, stopping only for a moment to glance at the canvas that lay on the attic floor. After decades living with Bella, she had come to know the faces she saw now very well. She could imagine them all walking up and down the boardwalk in the summer, little Bella running ahead of them all. She had imagined Christmas' surrounded by these people, Bella's mother saving an extra special present for her daughter under the tree. She even imagined meeting the handsome brothers, wondering if they were anything like her sister. If they were, she knew she'd fall head over hills for either of them.

She never did know which one was Michael and which one was Garrett. She didn't have the heart to ask.

 **-IISEID-**

I felt tired…so completely and fully exhausted. As fatigue goes, it wasn't a feeling that necessarily came with immortality, and yet here I was, my body feeling like it would crumble if anyone moved me too quickly.

It had always been this way. As soon as the sun faded from my eyes, allowing me to once again see the dark attic and the wreckage I had left behind in my state of panic, my body would collapse in on itself. Even Carlisle couldn't describe it.

I could hear his voice now stating that the only similarities he could recall in all his years were that of a starved vampire, their dead tissue eating away at itself from the lack of nourishment that our kind needed to remain strong and stealthy. But much of my behavior was a mystery to my Sire, who, if possible, looked sadder each and every time he laid eyes on me.

I didn't want these 'episodes' to plague this existence of mine, and yet they felt like they were apart of me. I would be lying, however, if I said that I didn't wait in anticipation for the moment the wall parted in my mind and the blinded vision that kept me from seeing the real world would return. It was then that I knew I would be allowed to see my family once more.

It was like a drug. Each and every time I took something from my body, leaving me weak and vulnerable. But I was too addicted to the high of it to actually care.

There might as well be track marks scarred deeply into the creases of my arms. Instead, I was left with blackened skin stained up to my elbows, serving as a visual for my shame, just as well as any needle marks could.

My arms seemed to come back to life the longer they soaked in the near boiling water of the bathtub. I began to rub the charcoal off my skin in slow passes with the washcloth Rose had left on the side of the tub for me.

The bath water clouded over with a grey sheen as the black dust separated from my porcelain skin.

Once the last of the charcoal was gone I lay surrounded by murky grey and now lukewarm water. I could easily reach up and drain the tub, get out, towel off and slip into the comfortable clothes Rose left sitting on the bathroom vanity. But I didn't.

In an hour or so, my sister would be back to refill the bath, allowing the dirty water to drain around my naked body. I never had enough shame left afterward to care to try to shield myself from her view. She knew me more intimately than any other person ever had.

More than Carlisle as he sunk his teeth into my jugular.

More than my mother as she birthed me from her own womb.

More than Robbie Mitchell, who although just a dark blimp in my memory, gave me my first kiss.

I sighed, letting my mind clear, sinking further into the soiled water. My head dipped down below the surface cutting me off from what lay beyond the bathtub, as much as a super hearing vampire could.

I tried, as I always do when lying here, to picture the glowing faces I had seen in the otherworldly sunshine just a short time ago.

Just like always though, no matter how hard I concentrated or pulled my conscience train of thought to the surface of my mind, I couldn't come up with the memories. My family was destined to remain nothing but cold sketches manically created by a certifiable girl stuck in the wrong era.

Not every day was like this…but most days I didn't fare much better. I laid in bed a lot, acting the way that any normal human would if they were 'depressed'. But the problem wasn't that I felt depressed, it was that I often felt nothing and in the course of a second I would transition to feeling everything.

Carlisle couldn't explain it. I knew that killed him inside, to know there was no magical diagnosis with a prognosis and medication regiment to go along with it. So little was known about how an immortal's body worked and even less about their minds. In his one thousand years, he had never met anyone like me.

I hear them whisper when they think my mind is too far away to comprehend.

Rose's words ran through my mind even now…" _we have to think that Bella wasn't meant for this life"_.

I could laugh thinking about it.

I knew I wasn't made for this world. I know you might think that there are no individuals that are supposed to live the way we do, but you would be wrong. I've met damned creatures that believe they didn't start living until the moment their hearts stopped beating. But I wasn't one of those vampires. I knew the moment my eyes opened, showing me the vistas of color that I had never been able to see before, that I would have rather died.

I wish he'd left me to bleed out in the snow, just the same as Rosalie wished he'd just snapped her neck like I begged him to.

Now, look at us. What do we have now?

I opened my mouth, inhaling enough dirty water to fill my lungs. I pretended I was drowning.

* * *

 **A/N:** Something new that's been swimming in my head for a while now. Let me know if you enjoyed. New posts every Monday.


	2. Chapter 2

"How much of my father am I destined to become? Will I dim the lights inside me just to satisfy someone?"  
- _In the Blood_ , John Mayer

 **Chapter Two  
** **EPOV**

* * *

You get tired of it all after a while.

The black suits, the chasing of prey, and especially their cries for mercy. Nothing about this life is surprising anymore. There is no fulfillment in what we are, just instant gratification that could only be found teeth deep in the neck of a breathing blood bag.

Here I sat, on a throne, watching another group of blubbering humans cry and wet themselves, calling for their mothers in a variety of languages.

It bored me.

Yet upon further analysis of my discontentment, it seemed such boredom was only covering up something much different.

I had first noticed it a few years back, an empty feeling that left me gasping for breath at certain moments in the day. Occasionally an ache would start in my chest cavity where my dead heart had not beat in almost 300 years. It was rather unnerving to my usually impenetrably stoic disposition.

It was for this reason that I was avoiding my maker. One touch and Aro would see. He would see my hardened shell, which made me so valuable, was weakening. There was no room for weakness in this coven and as much as I loathed it, the metaphorical crown that encircled my head was not only a gift of power but also a necessary tool for survival in Volterra.

But even that thought disinterested me as I examined my nails, a bit of dried blood was caked deep underneath the cuticle and I began to pick at it as the screams in the room escalated.

The "court", as we called it here in Volterra, began to split up the group, taking their pick of playthings. I didn't bother to watch, already knowing what would happen. Vampires were creatures of habit and each of my brothers and sisters had their preferred tastes when it came to feeding.

There were the first round picks, which always went to my Father and his brothers, who savored petite woman with pretty faces, a definite Dracula complex if you ask me. They worked fast, dragging their victims back to their chairs, only to slice through their necks and drain them completely before any of us could think about partaking in the meal.

Once finished, they would cradle their cooling carcasses like prize game trophies, watching their children feed.

The guard would step forward next, their strength ranked most valuable to the continued success of the court's operation and they must be kept well fed.

As if any of us would ever go hungry.

These were usually much larger creatures who spent their human lives beating women, one drink shy of alcoholism, and ducking through doorways that barely allowed for their swollen bodies to pass through.

Demetri, Felix and the rest were in charge of rounding up our food. That usually meant that the group was over saturated with tall bulky males who they would have fun pinning to the ground and emasculating as a way of inflating their own egos.

However, the most grotesque feeders were the 'gifted'. A group of us cursed with 'special' abilities beyond the normal spectrum for a vampire. Their victims, the unluckiest of the bunch, became playthings. There was something about watching them use their gifts to manipulate and torture that disgusted me, even though I ranked among them at one point.

Maybe it was because I could hear every thought flowing through the minds of both sides.

Their tastes varied based on their personal preferences for sex, age, and level of attractiveness, but mostly they went for the smallest and weakest in the group.

Jane and Alec, brother and sister monstrosities, had an additional gift of making everyone one in the room cringe during feeding time. They would take their meal to the nearest bedchamber, only to taunt, tease, and share the human both for nourishment as well as for baser sexual pleasures that often made me want to remove my own head and throw it into a blazing fire.

"Edward."

I glanced over at my maker, his crimson colored eyes wide and curious as he looked over at me.

"Yes, Aro," I replied, already knowing where his train of thought was headed.

"Not hungry my son?"

I could see how black my irises appeared through his mind. It had been weeks since I last feed properly.

"Not today father."

It was a lie. My throat was burning, filling up with stinging venom over and over again. However, the rest of my body had no interest in feeding.

"You can't let your food go ignored."

My eyes shot over to the lone human left alive in the center of the large throne room.

She was small and pretty, maybe 16 years old, barely one hundred pounds. Her heart beat calmly in her chest, her head tilted down to the floor. Her mind ran rampant with images of her family, but she stayed quiet. Every once in a while there was one who wouldn't be broken by the terror we tried to inflict on our prey.

"Go and eat Edward." Aro's voice was hard and cold. It was a command, not a suggestion.

It didn't matter to me. I looked back to Aro with eyes just as dead and unfeeling as his own.

"Not today father," I repeated.

He sighed, raising from his seat, the dead girl slipping from his lap, her head making a sickening sound when it hit the marble floor.

He approached me, his hand outreached to touch my own. But I wouldn't allow that. I was done letting him see into my head.

 _Now, now, my son let me see what troubles you._ He called out in his mind.

I quickly moved my body around his, one moment in my chair, the next standing in front of the girl meant for my meal.

She wouldn't look at me and I was thankful for the silence of her mind, the pictures moving languidly through my head were almost peaceful compared to the screams and pleas of all the others that had come before her.

 _Drink my son. She's dead already, you know that._

I did know that. There was no way this girl would ever see the light of day again…but at least I could make it quick, help her pass into a better beginning than this horrific end.

For a brief fraction of a second, I wondered why I even cared.

"I'm sorry," I whispered close to her ear, bending down so I was face to face with her.

I slipped my cold hands up her shoulders and onto her neck. Had we existed in a different time and place, the movement would have appeared almost sensual.

I took a deep breath, letting her scent fill my lungs. The venom pooled in the back of my mouth rapidly. The baser animal inside me screamed 'bite'.

But I resisted, even as tempting as the promise of true ecstasy to fill me once more was, and in one quick movement, I snapped her neck.

She was dead in the same instant. Her body fell limply into my arms. I pulled her weightless corpse against my chest.

Quite a crowd had drawn in the room as my brothers and sisters completed their feeding frenzies. Their thoughts were quiet for less than a second before chaos overtook the room.

"What the fuck Edward?" Demetri called from across the way.

"You just wasted a perfectly good meal!" Jane cried, her fists clenched next to her sides.

They continued their berating, but I ignored them all, focusing on my father instead who looked shocked, taken back by my uncharacteristically abrupt and disobedient actions.

 _You should not have done that Edward._

His voice rang through my head clearer than any other manic thoughts running rampant in the room.

I dropped the body of the girl at his feet, her blood chilled and congealing further every second we stood there.

"I wasn't hungry."

His eyes flashed deeply with anger and frustration, but I wasn't concerned. Once again I was bored.

 _My patience is wearing thin Son._

"I suggest you remove yourself from my sight before I do something I regret." He growled and I could practically see his chest vibrate through his centuries old, paper skin.

"Yes, Aro," I muttered before slowly exiting the room, ignoring the glares I received on the way out.

"Why did you do that?" Esme's musical voice rang out from deep in the library as soon as I closed the door behind me.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

I strolled over to one of the large leather armchairs, throwing my body onto it, enjoying the proximity it had to the fireplace that always blazed brightly when Esme was present.

 _Do you think I was born yesterday?_

Suddenly, she appeared leaning over the railing of the top floor in the vast and expansive library. Her face the warmest and most expressive I'd seen all day. It thawed my insides immediately.

"Should you really speak to your Sire that way?" I laughed. I enjoyed teasing her often; it made me feel almost human. Almost.

She disappeared from her spot leaning on the railing only to appear before me in the matching armchair, which sat opposite my own.

"Please Edward, darling" she rolled her eyes, "you're practically my child."

It was true.

Aro had sent me out with the guard a few decades ago in the 1930s. There was some trouble happening in New York and even at that time my interest in the Volturi was dwindling. He thought some travel and a task would keep my mind from wandering too far from his agenda.

However, it did quite the opposite.

Upon having an ounce of freedom from two centuries confided in the castle, I became very flightily. I slipped away from the group almost entirely unnoticed until Demetri finally realized it has been hours since I'd made a smart comment directed at his intelligence.

I stayed away from the city, looking for a spot deep in the wilderness where not a single wondering thought would slip into my head from another being. This great longing for silence led me almost 500 miles away to Ohio.

I found myself wandering through an expansive network of forest that lead into mountainous terrain with sharp overpasses that few cars seemed to utilize and steep cliff sides that stood under a dark starry sky. I let the silence overtake me, the peace of nothingness almost as euphoric as draining the blood of a human. I could have lain on the rocks and stared for hours, days, years even.

But just as quickly as I found my small slice of peace, it ended. I remember it so vividly, the annoyance that bubbled up in waves at the sound of the first car that passed through the mountainside. My brows furrowed in a deep crease, a litany of curses running through my head.

I was just on the brink of turning and dashing off into the deep woods again, longing to achieve the same delicious silence again, when her first thoughts filled my mind.

Her voice was soft and weak, even in her own head.

 _Haven't I been a good daughter God? Haven't I served my husband as best as I knew how?_

The smooth and calm thoughts were different from the others that I had spent the last two hundred years trying to block out. There was something almost comforting in hearing the demons of another.

 _Why have you allowed me a glimpse at being a good mother only to take him away from me?_

A vision of a pile of flesh wrapped in blue cotton came to my mind, but it was distorted in emotion, even her vision of the past was cloudy. But though the haze I could tell that the child placed into her arms had not survived the passage necessary to start a life.

 _I have never asked you for anything more than a reason to live my Lord._

From where I stood I could make out her small shadow standing just on the edge of one of the practically jagged looking cliffs. Her skirts billowed in the breeze.

 _Now you've taken my reason and so I must be done with this world. Forgive me._

I saw her jump from behind her eyes, saw her falling, saw her come in contact with the first piece of the mountainside. Only a second later her vision went black and I stood to watch with my own eyes as she finally landed in a still lump of skin and blood at the bottom of the cliffside. I could smell her in the air.

The unnerving feeling that ran through my body was like nothing I had ever felt before. It was a feeling so…human, something that I couldn't place, never having experienced it during my second life.

Without consent from my mind, my body rushed towards the silent woman who now lay in a pool of her own blood. The monster within me was nowhere to be found even as I pulled her to me, her sweet red fluids soaking my shirt.

Her face was cut and bleeding, her bones shattered in dozens of different places. A trickle of blood ran from her nose and out of her eye sockets. When I had approached her she was in an unnatural position that could only be described as broken. She would not live, and yet her heart still pumped slowly, crawling its way towards its last sputter.

She was a small woman, whose feet were bare and who's hair although now matted in blood was a beautiful rainbow of caramel colored browns and blondes like it couldn't decide which one it would rather be. A small and quick glimpse of my mortal mother's face flashed through my mind, just barely a blur. It was enough.

She twitched in my arms as I held her and suddenly memories from her short life flashed through my mind. The juxtaposition of her innocence to the cruel and abused life that she had lived brought an unexpected growl to my lips. In quick flashes, I became acquainted with her husband, a man with a permanent smell of alcohol on his breath and a thrill for physical violence. His hands wrapped around her lovely neck gave way to softer memories of her standing in front of a mirror, staring at her swollen stomach, a small smile fighting its way up to her lips. And once more a small bundle wrapped up in her arms came into view, the name Malcolm just a whisper in the cool nighttime air.

I should have let her die, but I couldn't help myself. I had finally found someone worth saving.

Esme was done with this world, but I was stupid enough to bring her into mine. A place she never belonged.

As it would turn out, Esme, for the next 90 years, would be the one who did the saving in our relationship.

Aro was furious when I finally brought her 'home'. He did not comprehend why I felt such a connection for another who, as I expressed many times, was not my mate. She was much more than a lover ever could be. She was my salvation, keeping me from getting myself destroyed over and over again. She reminded me that my throne was greater than the unknown of a second death.

She was mine and I was hers, we were some kind of twisted family. Just the two of us. She was a piece of my heart, ripped from my chest and beating wildly while the rest of me remained dead inside.

But often I repaid her gracious warmth and safe embrace with viciousness and cruelty. In the end, I really was no better than her abusive human husband.

"I wish you would tell me what you're thinking dear. Not all of us can read minds you know."

I sighed, leaning forward in the armchair, resting my elbows on my knees, my face falling into my palms.

"I'm losing interest."

She snorted, the sound so human-like that I couldn't help but smile at her.

"I don't know if I've ever seen you interested in anything Edward."

Her mind flooded with dozens of memories centered on my bored looking expression.

 _Boredom seems to be your default setting Edward._

"That's not entirely accurate Esme," I gave her one of my wicked smiles, "You interest me more every day."

She rolled her eyes but one of her signature warm and inviting smiles found it's way onto her face.

"What is a girl to do with you?" She mocked me.

 _Just imagine what someone could do with all that sarcasm and boredom wrapped up in one fine male specimen, the poster child of our race really. Now that would be a lucky girl._

Her smile widened.

I opened my mouth to let her know that she would be the only person in my life with whom I would ever allow to do anything with me.

"Not me Edward." Her smile fell as she took on a serious look. "While I love you more than anything, don't you ever wish someone would come along and…peak your interests?" She tilted her head down. If she could blush she would have at that moment.

"What? Like a mate?" I asked incredulously.

She nodded.

"Why would I want that Esme?"

She huffed, "Men don't really ever change do they?"

Her reaction to our banter was strangely serious considering the hypothetical of the conversation. Her mind remained blank to me even as I dug around to see what she might have been hiding under all those smiles and silky locks of hair.

I decided to change the subject before we wandered into a more hostile discussion, which never ended well.

"Why have you cooped yourself up in this dusty library again?"

The subtle ache that pounded away in my chest on random occasions began a painful throb. Esme's eyes slipped down to exact spot I hadn't realized I was rubbing small circles on my sternum where the discomfort radiated. I quickly dropped my hand upon seeing her lingering stare.

 _You know why._

I sighed, knowing all too well why she kept herself shut up in this ancient library that very few of the Volturi even knew existed. They were often too busy dealing with their bloodlust and anger issues to appreciate the history and beauty of the room.

Somehow we always came back to the same conversations. And I had no desire today to make my dear Esme cry. I had done enough of that for a lifetime, but there was no doubt in my mind that it was only a matter of time before I hurt her again.

I didn't respond to her hushed mental thought, instead simply letting the stirring air around us prick at my skin.

There was something very special held between the connection of a Sire and his creation. Nowhere near as potent or physical as a mating bond, but still a thin line attached Esme and I.

Without trying I could always sense where she was in the castle and when she left in secret to do her hunting in the woods surrounding Volterra. I had a heightened sense of her emotional state as well and many times I felt the need to reach out and hold her, my creation. Like a parent would his child.

She must have sensed my need, moving from her seat to join me on my own. Wedging her lithe body into the small space beside me. I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and she slipped her hand into my free one, her head resting in the crook of my neck.

There was nothing sexual about the interaction, just a simple way we found to connect with one another. Comforting the only way we could.

For all the time that I spent without Esme in my life, there was one thing that I had come to learn. This existence was much colder without someone by your side. As much as she didn't deserve my demons, my anger, the malice that swelled within me, I would never let her go. She was mine.

 _Edward._

Aro's voice rang out loudly in my mind, slicing through the cloud of contentment surrounding us.

 _My chambers. Now._

The growl that rumbled from my lips couldn't be helped upon hearing the command from my father. It was always an oddity to me that the only connecting emotions that I ever felt towards my creator were that of dissatisfaction and irritation, maybe even a touch of fear when I remembered he could just as easier snuff me out of this world as he had created me.

 _Edward?_

I gave Esme a sad smile as I slowly untangled myself from our comfortable embrace. Her mind called out in protest to my movement, desiring me to stay for a while longer.

 _He's always leaving._

I couldn't help but wince at the thought. I tried to keep it from being noticed, knowing that not everything in her head was supposed to be seen by anyone. But it didn't hurt me any less to hear such blunt and honest truths that she would never share with me out loud.

"My Sire is calling and unlike you," I smiled at her again, looking to lighten the mood, "I tend to obey mine."

Not even my forced attempt at humor could wipe away the frown that seemed to be permanently etched on her beautiful face.

"Edward?"

"Everything's fine, don't worry so much…mom."

She finally gave me a small smile at the endearment, but it didn't reach her eyes.

"I'll be back."

I left quickly; unable to withstand the look she was giving me for a moment more.

* * *

A/N: A first look at our Edward. I hope you continue to enjoy the story!


	3. Chapter 3

**"And don't fucking move, 'cause everything you thought you had will go to shit. We've got a lot, don't you dare forget that. And I'm wasted, you can taste it. Don't look at me that way, 'cause I'll be hanging from a rope...I will haunt you like a ghost"**  
 _-Broadripple is Burning_ , Margot & the Nuclear So and So's

 **Chapter Three:**  
 **BPOV**

* * *

" _Summertime and the livin' is easy. Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high. Oh, your daddy's rich and your ma is good lookin'. So hush little baby, don't you cry."_

The sweet, silvery voice filled the dark attic. The old-time music cracked and popped on the now antique gramophone that sat in the corner, surrounded by piles of vinyl records in faded cardboard jackets.

Rosalie had procured a portable cassette player for me one Christmas back in the early 1980s, with a false hope that I would give up on the clunky music maker to which I seemed to have an "unhealthy attachment". Unfortunately for her, it remained in its box until it finally became obsolete and she felt compelled to replace it with something similar called a compact disk. It suffered the same dusty fate.

Despite my lack of interest in such things, she didn't give up her efforts and now a strange rectangular palm-sized device, named an 'iPod', had a permanent place in some charging apparatus on one of the windowsills.

I preferred the big beautiful contraption with its golden horn and rickety turntable. It reminded me, that like it, I was also just an antique stuck in a world that refused to accept us as time ticked on.

I had a problem adapting to such a passing of time. My sister was a natural at such things however and kept up with the latest fashions, technology and specifically automobiles as if she was born to live in each generation that we outlived.

Her sentiment for fast vehicles with shiny hoods came from her father, a man who spent his days as a banker and his nights under the carriage of any car he could get his hands on. She recalled blurry memories of spending weekends in their little suburban garage handing him wrenches. That was until her mother finally deemed it inappropriate, stuck her in a debutante's dress and pawned her off to the man who would come to leave her dying in an alley only a few years later.

She carried her father's passion with her into this life, a way to connect with the only man who ever showed her kindness and gratitude in her human years. Her devotion to maintaining the hobby now required a large twelve-car garage that housed only a handful of the vehicles she's salvaged and restored. The rest were scattered across the country, a collection too large to hold in any one storage space.

I always admired the respect and determination she had for her father's craft. However, alongside such admiration were inevitable stabs of jealousy when I thought of her keeping her father's memory alive, whereas my father was only a dark shadow in the cracks of my consciousness. I would never be able to recall his interests or passions even if I wanted to.

In addition to her affinity for cars, Rosalie had also made it her familial responsibility to purchase all our wardrobes, make necessary home décor updates as well as to keep all legal documentation changed and renewed every decade or so when we could no longer afford to live in one identity.

Carlisle didn't seem to have a problem keeping up with medical advances. With the unlimited capacity that our minds could hold it was relatively simple. And while there were a few items he remained sentimental about, he could still be found in his office reading the latest John Grisham novel on his Kindle…whatever that was.

Then there was me.

I was lost in a different era, committed to remaining where I had left off in my life. I walked about wearing my drop waist dresses that had to be handmade by Rose, who couldn't find such clothing in any modern department stores. Carlisle special ordered all of my typewriter ribbons and ink pens, and even my gramophone was tracked down from an antique shop somewhere on the east coast.

Articles from my lifetime in the past lay around the room, which looked more like a cluttered museum exhibit than an inhabited space. A 'Vote for Women 1914' sash hung above my bed, over 100 years old, preserved by a glass frame. My red and white Vassar school uniform still hung in the closet, an outfit from a bygone era, stained with blood that would never come out no matter how many times I had scrubbed it. I could see the college's seal on the breast pocket, the goddess Athena looking out at me.

My old wooden desk chair creaked as I leaned back, my eyes closing at the crisp sound of Louis' gravely voice joining in to meet Ella in a marriage of melody that sunk into your soul.

" _One of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing. And you'll spread your wings and you'll take to the sky. But till that morning, there ain't nothin' can harm you with daddy and mommy standin' by"_

A smoldering cigarette lay in an ashtray on the desk, a cup of coffee emitting a fragrant steam sat next to it.

The smells no longer appealed to me like they had when I was human, but their presence sent a familiar tingle down my spine, eliciting vague yet valuable snippets of memories from my father's office.

I sighed at the thought, knowing full well that I would never be able to retrieve the sunken recollections from their place inside my mind. They were lost forever.

I managed to push past the thought, storing it in the overstuffed closet filled with streams of consciousness too depressing to bear. I returned to the scattered papers lying haphazardly in front of me. My Smith Corona typewriter was shoved to the side of the desk today in favor of my handwritten notes. I began a new page, not liking how I started the last.

 _ **Dearest Jasper,**_

 _ **You have not responded to my most recent letter, which was posted nearly a month ago. I'm beginning to wonder if you have grown exasperated by our correspondence. If that is indeed the case, I then beg of you to return to your home and visit me once more. For I would be telling a falsity if I said that I have faired well without you…**_

 _ **You have a way with your magical emotions, dear brother, that calms me in a way that no other can. I also fear that I'm wearing on Rose and Carlisle...**_

"You're not wearing on anyone Isabella." Carlisle's voice startled me from my concentration causing my hand to slip and the ink from my pen to run over the page in dramatic splotches.

"I didn't say anything Carlisle." I turned to look at him, wondering how he could know what I had only just written down before me.

I raised an eyebrow in his direction.

He titled his head, giving me a peculiar look from where he stood leaning against the door of my attic loft.

"You were just reading aloud as you wrote." He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

I hadn't realized I was doing it again.

I shrugged in response to his remark. I silently hoped he would also forgo restating his original comment. I was tired of hearing about how much of a non-nuisance I actually was to my family.

"Writing to Jasper?" He seemed to want to change the subject himself. He approached my desk, taking a seat in the warn armchair next to where I was sitting.

"Yes, I haven't heard from him since last month." I tapped the fountain pen against the chipped varnished finish of the desk.

Ella and Louis had finished their duet and the needle fell away from the edge of the record.

"And what is the date, Bella?"

My eyes flashed to his, bright golden yellow irises fresh off of a hunt and filled with cautiously prying intentions. My nose twitched at the smell of him. The blood was still fresh on his breath.

Irritation grew hot in the pit of my empty stomach. My answer was brimming with fire and venom. "It's July thirteenth, Carlisle."

My bitter answer didn't seem to faze him. He only smiled back at me and continued his examination of my sanity.

"What year?" He crosses his legs, folding his hands over the top of each other on his knee.

"1984," I spat out.

His reaction was only evident in the slight twitch of his smile and the darkening of his eyes.

It was my turn to grin condescendingly back at him. "I jest…it's 2017. I may practically be an invalid, but my day-to-day mental capabilities are fine Doctor."

My Sire sighed, the smile falling from his beautiful face. He rose from his seat pacing over to the gramophone that now lay silent. He picked up the needle and removed the record from the spinning plate.

"You know I have to ask sometimes. When you lock yourself up here for weeks on end with nothing but albums from the 1930s to keep you company, one can only assume you may start to convince yourself that Billy Holiday is still on tour and Franklin Roosevelt is president."

"Haha, Carlisle." I turned back to my letter, ruined already by the bleeding ink blotches.

"I think I may know why you haven't received a response from Jasper recently."

I turned my head over my shoulder, just in time to see him pluck a new record from the bottom of a particularly large pile stacked against a bookshelf.

"Oh?"

In one graceful and fluid movement, he expertly slides a new vinyl from its sleeve and settled it into its spot on the platter, dropping the needle in the first groove. He was in no rush to answer as he waited for the first note to hit.

"He telephoned last week when I was at the hospital."

The pop and crackle gave way to an orchestra. I raised an eyebrow at his album choice; already privy to exactly which he had chosen just by the first three notes played.

"Barbara Streisand, really?"

He smiled and began to sway back and forth to the rhythm.

" _So long sad times, go long bad times, you are now a thing of the past."_

I couldn't help but laugh out loud. This was rather out of character for my very proper-natured Sire. We had spent many nights, before Rosalie, dancing in the parlor of the many houses we'd lived in. Early on we discovered a mutual love for slow jazz and a longing to relieve the loneliness of our existence for just a few hours in the darkness of night by holding each other close.

However, solo performances were never his forte.

"I rather enjoyed her movies if you do recall."

He walked over to me, his hips moving with a fluidity that reminded me of how devastatingly good looking my 'father' really was. Although only a few years separated us physically, his mental age towered over me like a wise old man does a babe. However, I hadn't been lost to the visage of his perfectly sculpted jaw or his tall and strong frame, but I never thought of placing the two of us in a romantic relationship.

He had confessed to me a few decades after I had started my new vampiric life, that he had initially thought that I may have been his mate…something to do with mistaking the strong maker, creation bond we shared for that of a mating bond.

I remember vividly trying not to laugh. I could never see him as anything more than the guiding hand of an older brother or a gentle father figure. Rosalie, who had recently joined us at that point, laughed for days upon hearing about the confession.

She enjoyed mocking him. I just enjoyed being close to him.

"If I could emote embarrassment right now I would." I grinned ear to ear, a sensation that my face wasn't used to experiencing.

I let him pull me from my chair.

"Dance with me, Bella." His words were barely a whisper.

At that moment he seemed so young. More like the 26-year-old man rather than the century-old vampire. He so rarely broke away from his cordial and righteous way of being to throw his head back and laugh. I would never say it out loud, but I blamed myself for much of his stoic behavior.

We used to smile a lot more.

He pulled me close, his tall frame engulfing me just enough so my head fit perfectly under his strong defined chin. I could feel the hidden muscles of his back flex, as I pressed closer, enveloping myself in his scent and protective embrace.

My hand slipped into his, while the other rested on his shoulder blade. He pulled me close wrapping his arm around my waist. Any curiosity I had to continue our conversation about Jasper floated away.

The song changed and Barbara's sad sultry voice made the moment feel even more profound like we were thrown back to long cold nights in New York where he taught me so much.

" _Now you say you're lonely, you cry the long night through."_

I sighed deeply, feeling the venom pooling into my eye sockets, like tears that would never fall. It stung in more ways than one.

" _Well, you can cry me a river, cry me a river. I cried a river over you."_

I hid my face deeper into Carlisle's neck, feeling the lyrics elicit familiar feelings of shame that always lay just below the surface.

"You're sad." His voice was soft and filled with its own sadness next to my ear.

"I'm always sad Carlisle." I breathed out.

I felt his arms tighten even further around me as we swayed to the music, her voice becoming desperate, filled with a rage that felt so real. I wanted to scream for her.

" _You drove me, nearly drove me, out of my head. While you never shed a tear."_

"I don't want you to feel that way, Bella. I want you to find some kind of contentment in this life that God has given you."

I stopped moving then, his words sinking into me like a paralyzing poison. I turned my face up to his, so close I could taste the blood on his breath.

"This life was not given to me by God." My words felt like fire coming off my tongue.

"Isabella-"

"No," I pulled away from his embrace, but he clung onto me, his arms like steel refusing to let me go. "You can't use God as the reason for me being here, stuck in perpetual purgatory."

I was breathing heavily now, unable to stop my cruel yet honest words.

"You did this to me! You kept me from ever getting my salvation!"

He let my struggling body go and I stumbled backward.

"Bella I-", he didn't have words to once again express his true hopelessness I knew he felt whenever we recalled how I came to exist in this in-between world, not quite alive but not quite dead either.

"Because of _you_ ," The pronoun came out like acid, "I will never get to see them again…my family." I hissed. My fingers twisted at the fabric covering my heart as if the stillness of the organ pained me worse than any pumping broken heart ever could.

I didn't want to see his face as the cold, harsh words hit him fully and I didn't want to hear his excuses or the repetitive apologies. So I turned and ran.

Barbara's mezzo-soprano hit a high and followed my prompt exit, leaving Carlisle to sit in the cruelty I'd left around him.

" _If my pillow could talk, imagine what it would have said. Could it be a river of tears I cried instead? So you can cry me a river, go ahead and cry me a river…cause how I cried a river over you."_

 **-IISEID-**

She left him standing in the middle of the attic, wishing the floorboards would open up and swallow him deep into the earth. He remained still; replaying her words on a loop in his head, letting each accusation hit him hard, like a blow absorbed painfully into his chest.

"Forgive me, God." He finally muttered, instinctively placing his hand over the cold crucifix that lay beneath his white button-down shirt.

The music abruptly stopped, the vinyl plucked off just as gracefully has it had been placed down. Rosalie slipped the album back into its dusty jacket.

"Carlisle." She addressed him cautiously as if he were a wounded animal. He didn't have to turn and see her to hear the pity in her voice.

"Will you please go find Isabella and make sure she's not alone? I don't like when she's by herself."

"Sometimes being alone can be good for her."

"Please!" He cried out suddenly. He's plea vibrated throughout the room.

"Carlisle," Rosalie had moved forward, placing her hand on his shoulder, drawing him away from his rooted spot. "She needs some space. You know she'll feel terrible about what she said. But she needs some freedom right now to work it out."

He sat on Bella's bed, his head buried into the palms of his praying hands.

"Sometimes I wonder if I'm living in my own personal hell." He mumbled under his breath.

Rosalie perched herself on the ledge of the windowsill, a spot that gave her a better view of the place her sister had disappeared through the thick trees into the dark woodlands beyond their home.

"Why do you say such a thing?" She wondered. Staring at her creator in his moments of self-deprecation always made her love him more. It was in these moments that he truly became human again.

"Because I am forever cursed to exist with eternal companionship of my own vile creation."

Rose's eyebrows furrowed together, her arms crossing over her chest.

"Are we really such bad company?" She couldn't help the sadness that sunk into her words.

His head shot up from its hiding place inside his palms, his eyes were wide and disturbed.

"No Rosalie." He breathed out, his voice filled with vastly poignant emotions that interwove into each syllable. "What I mean is that in my 1000 years I have found no greater hope for joy and true fulfillment as I have in the presence of Bella and yourself."

If her cheeks could flush they would have been tinged a lovely pink in that moment. Her creator had difficulty expressing such raw sentiment these days and this was a hopeful breath of fresh air. His admittance moved her to cross the room and sink to her knees in front of him, taking his hands into her own.

"And yet this time and place in which we all co-exist is your greatest torment?"

A gentle squeeze of his companion's hands gave him the courage to explain his thought process.

"Everyday that God lets us remain on this earth I am blessed to do so in your company, even on the bad days." He didn't have to explain to Rose what those days were like. She was his most valuable ally in those dark times. "But, the blessing is too often clouded by my plagued mind and conscience."

"From what?" She whispered, staring at him as if he held the answers to all of this life's questions.

"From knowing that both of you would trade away your days with me for an eternity that isn't poisoned by bloodlust, monotony and such pronounced longing for something greater." His eyes held tears that would never be shed, his face an open book of a brokenhearted man.

Rosalie had heard this all before. Her Sire had spent the better part of the first decade they spent together trying to make amends for his big heart and the silvery crescent scar that now adorned her neck.

Carlisle's utmost flaw was that he didn't have the ability to let go. He wanted to save everyone and unfortunately for him his eternal curse gave him the ability to do just that if he chooses. Rose could easily think back to several times when Bella and herself were forced to reined him in, if not there would be quite a few more individuals inhabiting their home.

She knew that a different kind of purpose came with Carlisle's reason for creating her. A story only told once in quiet and rushed whispers between herself and Bella. He once had a sister, long ago, whose abrupt death came at the hands of savage men who had beaten and violated her innocence.

Carlisle wouldn't let it happen again.

And thus Rosalie was born, just as miserable and longing for salvation from this world as Bella. However, she lacked the clouded sanity that made her sister so…tormented.

"Carlisle," she sighed before straightening up to look him in the eye. "I long for heaven, or salvation, or whatever release we can achieve from this world as much as you do and even as much as Bella."

"I-" he began but Rose quickly continued, no longer allowing him to persist on with his self-loathing behavior.

"However, I could never hate or resent you for only doing what your soul told you was right. I've been apart of a family for sixty years now. A family that has loved me fuller and more immensely than the one I would have ever possessed in my human life.

And yes, I still wish you'd had just snapped my neck and taken the memories and all the pain away, but something told you to save me instead."

She released one of his hands, reaching up to let it rest on his chest, just above where the gold cross lay underneath his shirt.

"We're all tragic Carlisle, no one in this life had a good ending…or beginning for that matter. You woke up alone in a potato sack, left to deal with the ravenous hunger of a newborn and no guiding hand to help you understand it all. I was beaten and raped, left to die by myself in that cold ally. And…"She paused the vehemence of her declaration still burning in her throat. "And Bella would have never made it home to her family. No matter what happened. She would have bled out in the snow, the lords prayer the last thing she ever spoke for no one to hear but the night air."

"Rose." His hands shook in hers.

"You know what it's like to have no one Carlisle, and you made sure we always had you."

They sat in silence for a long drawn out moment as Rosalie's lengthy statement seeped into their bodies.

"And Bella is lost…still. The worst thing you can do now is to let her words drive you away. Because she still needs you."

She rose with her Sire, slipping her hand up to cup the cheek of his beautiful face and leaned in to place a loving kiss on the other.

"She may not be meant for this world, but she's meant to be with us until her time comes to leave." She spoke softly next to his ear, so close she could feel the shutter that raked his body, before releasing him completely.

"I'm going to find our lovely Bella. So she's not alone."

With that, she left the doctor standing by himself in the attic once more.

* * *

A/N: As you will see more and more of, there is a toxic quality to the deep relationships that are forged throughout this story. The idea that we can't help but love the people who end up hurting us, is very prevalent among all the characters and will continue to develop as we go on. I hope you stick around for the ride and let me know what you think.

Just a few housekeeping things.

 **One:** For reference, my characters, while derived from the original Twilight, have different creation stories, ages, etc. I will be sure to include a full listing of those things as we get further along. If there's any confusion please feel free to note so in the comments and I will do my best to address any concerns.

 **Two:** Song references for this chapter...in case you were curious and looking to expand your repertoire.

- _Summertime_ , Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong  
- _Happy Days are Here Again_ , Barbara Streisand  
- _Cry Me a River_ , Barbara Streisand


	4. Chapter 4

**"When the night was full of terrors. And your eyes were filled with tears." _  
_** _-The Night We Met,_ Lord Huron

 **Chapter Four:  
** **EPOV**

* * *

As I left a confused and sullen-looking Esme in my shadow, I already knew what Aro was going to say.

His thoughts were less scattered than usual. On a normal day, while he couldn't block all of his thoughts from my 'gift', I only received flashes of age-old memories, snippets of internal conversation and sometimes pieces of complicated mental mapping that revolved around his decision-making.

As I gingerly made my way down the labyrinth of dimly lit hallways that made up the mass workings of the Volturi castle, he let me fully see what lurked in his vast mind. It was almost painful to bear it all; so full of other people's consciousness it was hard to find any order amongst the disarray.

Perhaps he knew that he could slowly drive me mad this way.

However, behind the cloud of buzzing consciousness, I picked out the thought that made me grimace. The topic of conversation today would not be pleasant.

At last, it appeared that I was about to become a banished prince, barred from his throne.

"Aro," I greeted him with clutched teeth as I pushed open the heavy door leading into his personal chambers.

Entering the 'living' space of a vampire who's age spanned millenniums was much like stepping back in time. The same bed curtains he had brought from India in 1863 still hung on the grand four-poster bed that I had gathered, probably once belonged to a tsar or emperor. Stacks of disintegrating first addition books lined the floors, looking as if they hadn't been touched in decades. The room was permeated with a smell like that of an ancient crypt, clean yet preserved and stale. A span of 3000 years crept along every crevice, seeping into the stone floors.

My eyes drifted over to Sulpicia, my creator's formidable mate.

She was perched like a statue on a historic looking chaise, positioned by the only window not draped in thick velvet curtains. She embodied a darker looking Pauline Bonaparte, posing while Canova chiseled her into Venus Victrix. She could have been the statue itself, in her cold unmoving position.

If there were any sorrow to feel for those doomed to live out eternity roaming these great governing halls, it would solely be dedicated to Sulpicia and Athenodora. They had to be the two most unfortunate women in the world to end up crossing paths with Aro and Caius. If only they had known what their 'lovers' would do to them. That their minds would be polluted and then wiped clean by the dastardly Corin. Her power to manipulate contentment kept my Sire's mate in a constant state of thinking she was living an existence complete and satisfied.

Even now, I could hear very little mental thought transmitting from her mind. She existed to serve her mate as the rest of us, only she had the unfortunate duty of remaining in his company for eternity, doomed to look like a cadaverous Venus who's only real purpose was to keep a bed warm.

My nose twitched at the thought. I could smell them in the air.

I had been spared from the company of many mated pairs, fortunately only a handful were scattered throughout our large coven, but I quickly noticed that once bonded to one another both mates seemed to take on an identical scent. Very little variation or differences exist between such a pair, and they were generally seen as nothing but an unwanted weakness to a Volturi warrior.

It wasn't love that drew mates together. I doubt that Aro had ever loved anything except the taste of blood on his tongue.

No, his connection to Sulpicia was not for emotional contentment but rather a necessity of survival that was both anatomical and supernatural. The pull of a mate is undeniable and separation is deadly once bonding is complete. The weight of the most powerful creature in the world rested in the existence of the fragile immortal woman before me.

She made him feeble. So he locked her up and took away her will.

"Edward has come to visit us _cara bella."_ My gaze moved to Aro, who sat behind a behemoth of a desk made of stained solid wood.

His eyes barely acknowledged his mate and in return she moved slowly, her neck twisting her face just slightly to catch a glimpse of Edward from her peripheral view.

"Bonjourno, Edoardo." She breathed out the words, a small languid smile barely forming around my name spoken in her native Italian.

Her thoughts came slowly and in her mind, I could see that her words were placed in command to our maker, not in recognition of my own presence.

"It's just past five in the evening _ma bella._ " Aro corrected her greeting and I wondered, for not the first time, if he truly did not know how far gone the mental capacities of his mate extended. His thoughts would ultimately lead me to the assumption that he liked her the way she was…pretty and mute.

She turned her head back to stare out the window at the summer sun, ignoring or unable to answer his remark. My eyes lingered on her for a moment longer before Aro called me back to focus with his mind.

 _Perhaps it is time you found your mate, Edward._

His eyes sparkled in a malevolent blaze of burgundy. A freshly fed Master was always the most lenient.

"Esme and you seem to have similar minds today." I thought aloud at the irony of that.

A quiet growl vibrated in his chest. "Yes, well there isn't much that I and that ' _child_ ' have in common."

I stared at him blankly, expressing my boredom with the conversation in order to cover up the rage that was rapidly burning instead me. I stuffed my tightly clenched fists into the pockets of my black trousers, not wishing to cause alarm to my surmounting anger.

Stoicism was the rule of thumb in this coven, to deny the last vestiges of human behavior that ruled over us.

"Haven't you had enough babysitting with her yet? I don't understand why you feel such a kinship with her my son. She is not your mate, you refuse to use her for any practical purposes-" A raw yet studied depiction of Esme and I entangled in a pile of flesh flooded the forefront of my mind, pushed through by the decrepit vampire sitting in front of me.

A low snarl started in the back of my throat, but he ignored it and continued on with his ramblings.

"She won't conform to our way of living and worst of all she brings no contribution to our assembly. She is an absolute waste of space and resources."

"Enough," I growled between clenched teeth. The rage coming dangerously close to boiling over, to making me do something I would regret.

"I have a great respect for you my son, but your choice of companionship has left me disappointed in you. She is just deplorable. It may pain you to see her go, as any maker would his creation, but perhaps it is time to see her set free."

I leaped forward without thinking, charged by the nonchalant yet devastating caliber of his words. The monster inside me overpowered every thought and action, pushing all reason to the side.

Before I could blink, I was leaning over Aro's ancient desk, pulling him out of his seat by a crushing grip encircling his throat.

He looked amused.

"She is mine! And she is never leaving my side." I barely recognized my own voice.

The demonic sound sent a chill through the room. Sulpicia remained as still as a statue even as I pushed my fingers deeper into my Sire's concrete-like flesh, small fracturing cracks began to pop and deepen in his skin.

"My, my Edward, you really are quite possessive of your toys, especially when you're hungry." He laughed in my face.

I could see my pitch black eyes reflecting back at me from Aro's mind. The primal fury raging inside me began to dissipate as I floated back down into reality. A reality in which I was inflicting harm on the one creature that would personally see me destroyed with the flick of a wrist.

Such actions had consequence here and even I was expendable if I became too much to handle, too disobedient. Corin's contentment would be whimsical compared to what Jane could do to me…or Esme.

I shuttered at the thought.

I hadn't been thinking of her before, when I killed the girl back in the throne room, disobeying orders. If I am punished it would directly effect Esme. They could only hurt me by hurting her and if I went, there was nothing keeping her safe from the monsters that would do much more than make her cry.

"Ah...yes, the light bulb has finally clicked on."

Everything snapped into place quickly as I finally allowed my gaze to trail from Aro's excited eyes to where my bare hand was still gripping my Sire's throat. With this touch I had allowed him entrance into my mind, all my mental workings and every piece of information I had wished to keep hidden away were given up in seconds.

I released my hold on him, my hand whipping itself away as if I had been gripping fire all this time.

He straightened himself, dusting off his black suit. He nudged his tie back into place before taking a seat once more behind the desk. The cracks in his neck began healed quickly. Not a single wince or grimace crossed his face as the stinging venom did its job.

"Such amazing thoughts my dear boy. It's been too long since you've let me have a glimpse." There was an unsettling devotional hold Aro's eyes had when he stared at his subjects. It was as if everything he saw he was looking at for the first time. He peeled it apart and examined each aspect just with his gaze alone.

He could make you feel most intimately violated without even touching you before he even saw what was hidden in your mind.

"Your loyalty is wavering." His voice grew colder, the bemusement falling quickly from his stone-like face. "And your devotion to the animal lover is much greater than I'd realized."

I was lost for words. I crumpled into the large velvet-lined chair that sat in front of his desk. The cushioning, in all of its age, had lost its shape and I sunk closer to the ground. Aro towered over me from across the immaculate expanse of wood polished oak.

"Forgive me, Father." My voice sounded pathetic to my own ears, but I was prepared to beg for Esme's sake. "Do what you like with me, but don't involve Esme, she knows not the failings of her Sire."

He sighed, letting our gazes linger for a moment before he looked back down at this desk, picking up a piece of paper covered in sprawling script. His mind moved frantically between thoughts and memories. It was impossible for me to make sense of anything concrete.

"I've received a letter from my dearest friend Carlisle Cullen. Have I ever made mention of the time he spent here in Volterra to you?" I shook my head, not recalling the name. "He spent quite a few decades with us, but our lifestyle didn't seem to stick with the man. Pity really. He was quite the intellectual and would have been a great pleasure to have amongst the Court."

A glint of something ran through Aro's mind, but he quickly covered it with thoughts and memories of the man to who he referenced.

"Do you recognize him at all Edward?"

He pushed the visage of a blonde, attractive looking man into my mind. I rubbed my temples as wave after wave of mental stimulant was pummeled into my foresight courtesy of my Sire. I was unsure as to how the topic had anything to do with what had just happened between Aro and myself.

"He's one of the men pictured in one of the paintings in the Great Hall," I muttered.

"Yes! That is precisely correct son." His sudden excitement was a drastic and immediate difference from his previous icy-like disposition. "The great feast of St. Marcus circa 1374."

"Why are we talking about Carlisle Cullen Aro?"

"He is imperative to reinforce the natural order of our coven Edward. We must right your wondering disposition and get you back on track to an existence of governing our people." His grin was back, stretching ear to ear, and my annoyance lay simmering in the pit of my stomach.

"I have received a letter from my dear friend Carlisle most recently." He repeated himself. "It seems that he has added a member to his party, a companion not unlike your own Edward. It seems that the poor soul is having difficulty with performing his Sire duties. I'm led to believe the girl isn't taking to the vampiric world very well, a struggler I'm afraid."

"Okay," I responded with confusion.

"Carlisle may benefit from our assistance in this matter. We can't have unruly newborns painting towns red. Your touch has brought me much clarity to your own companion's struggles. She is a wayward creation Edward, but you have accepted her responsibilities as your own, done the best you can. You can only do so much for a broken creature."

I had to remind myself not to leap back over the table and rip his head from his shoulders. I could see the wickedness in his face. His eyes screamed for me to attack again as if this was all a game to him and he dearly wanted to see me lose. What his vague words lacked in substance was made up for by the resounding message blaring from his mind. I wasn't about to worsen my punishment to appease the mischief he wished to engage in.

"So, I'm going away." There was no questioning in my words. This decision had been in his thoughts from the very beginning, although I had expected much worse in terms of my overthrow. I'd expected more shouting, a slew of guards and an unceremonious burning of my body.

He ignored my commentary, continuing on as if we both were privy to exactly what was occurring. He didn't need to explain anything to me, he never did, but it often made for half-conversations that made little sense to everyone else witnessing them.

But here and now, it was just a Sire and his creation.

"I've had Felix track down his current residence, so there will be no delay in your departure. You'll be gone by tomorrow's first light."

I stared, attempting to work out the last five minutes in my mind, hoping to find the answer in his taunt translucent skin and bloody irises.

 _Have we an understanding, Edward?_

I nodded, stood from the chair and was ready to dash from the room, his dead eyes making me feel deeply uncomfortable, a feeling I wasn't used to experiencing…even when in the presence of my maker.

"Edward?" He didn't bother to look up from the scattered papers that he was already back to scribbling over with his feather quill.

"Yes, Father?"

His eyes raised just a hair, a serious look was etched into his translucent flesh.

"This is the last time that you'll be shown my good graces. Go, spend some time with Carlisle, see how flawed his way of living is and return ready to be a part of my empire…or you won't be allowed to exist in it."

He spoke calmly as if he were telling an anecdote, not threatening my existence.

I didn't wait for him to add onto his deadly promise. I left his chambers quickly, a dangerous sounding growl ripping through my chest on its own accord.

I walked back to the library where I had left Esme just a moment ago. However, the burned down embers of the fire and the silence of the room told me that she was no longer inside.

I let my body find her, pulled along by the invisible string that connected us.

I found her inside my own bedchambers, her mind afloat with conflicting thoughts of happiness, fear, and anticipation. She ran back and forth across my rarely used room, piling clothes into an ancient looking trunk.

"Esme?"

She jumped in her spot, so lost in her own thoughts she hadn't heard me enter.

"Edward!" She tucked a hair behind her ear.

She paced over to me, taking my hand in her small one, pulled me over to the bed. She shoved lightly at my chest, desiring for me to take a seat. I watched her with stoic eyes.

"What are you doing?" I grabbed her hand, she had begun to once again fill the large chest with item after item. My grip forced her to be still.

She smiled brightly, her round mature face looked ethereal, the sun from my open window, no doubt her doing, streamed around her like a blanket of light. She was an angel stuck in Hell. I was the demon that dragged her down into the flames.

"We're going on an adventure!" She jumped up and down on her bare feet, more like a child than a woman.

However, her excitement quickly dissipated upon seeing the stricken look on my face.

"We're leaving, aren't we Edward?"

I wanted to pull her towards me, but I had a feeling she wouldn't want to be anywhere near me after what I had to say. My hands twitched at the denial of being near to her. The demon inside me shook at his cage ready for a fight with our creation.

"I'm sorry." She pulled on my hands, tugging at them like a little girl seeking her father's attention. "I followed you," she whispered shamefully, "I-I stayed just close enough to make sure that you'd be okay, that he didn't take you away." There was something off in her tone…it was unmistakable fear.

I sighed, giving in and pulling her closer. I didn't know how much she had heard and I chided myself thinking that for once Esme would do what I told her and stay safely in the library.

"Esme, I need you to stay here," I spoke softly.

For a moment we both sat in the silence, feeling the weight of my command. However, like I suspected, that moment ended when she ripped herself away from my grasp.

"What?" She gasped, staring at me with her dark, wide, doe eyes. "You can't leave me here Edward!" Her face was transfixed with panic, her chest rose and fell rapidly with heavy breathes. She was quickly working her mind up into a frenzy of very human emotions.

I tried to grab her hand but she pulled it quickly out of my reach.

"Esme, please-"

"No! Do you have any idea of what happens when you leave Edward? Have you ever even bothered to think about what they'd do to me?" Those who say vampires are not capable of crying have never seen Esme with her glossy eyes and panic-stricken voice.

I'd seen it too many times.

"I-"

She pointed an accusing finger at me.

"When you leave the castle, even for the smallest window of time, they torment me." She cried out and I was reminded of the time Demetri and Felix held her on the ground as Jane and Alec ripped apart her library. It flashed through her mind.

" _Edward should have let you die"_

" _Even your baby didn't want you as his mother."  
_

" _Maybe we can have some fun with this one, huh Felix?"_

The violent memories stung me as she replayed them. Her eyes never leaving mine while she showed me every detail.

"Stop!" I growled, taking her aggressively by the arms, my fingers digging into her flesh just like I had Aro's neck. I couldn't bear to see all of it again.

"Take me with you." She pleaded, emphasizing each word in desperation.

"I can't do that Esme. Aro is not…'pleased' with me and I can't be sure what I'm being sent away to. What if it's a trap?"

Her eyes flashed back and forth between my own dark irises, surrounded by bruised looking skin. I needed to feed…badly.

"They'll kill me if you leave, and if they don't I'll throw myself into the closest burning fire."

An animalistic snarl came out of my mouth like a roar, my finger digging deeper into her arms. She flinched but didn't say anything. She just continued to stare up at me with her big, glassy, pleading eyes.

She, of course, was right. If she stayed here I would have no way of keeping her out of harm's way from the other demonic creatures that roamed these halls. But if she followed me, there was no telling if she would be any safer by my side. Either way, our futures were uncertain.

There was only one-way to ensure she would be protected for as long as possible.

"Fine!" I screamed in her face, finally letting go of her battered arms in favor of tugging violently at my wild hair. "But, you need to make me a promise." I took a quick step towards her. I could see the manic look in my eyes in her mind. She automatically stepped away from me, keeping space between us.

"Anything," she whispered, a small sob got caught in her throat, her hands tangled together nervously.

"When we leave here, no matter what happens to me…you will never come back to this place again…even if I have to. And you have to find a life without me."

 _Edward!_

Her hands rose up to hold her face. Her body shook with silent sobs and dry tears.

 _I can't live without you. I wouldn't know where to go or how to exist. There would be no point!_

We stood together, my face a mask of stone; hers filled with deep emotions that were remnants of a broken girl abused by a cruel man. I wasn't her husband but I had taken the place of the abuser in her life.

We'd been here before.

"Promise me, Esme."

Her mind moved in a slow circle of denial for my words and an acceptance that there was no way to change my decision. Ultimately, as in my own decision, there was only one real choice.

"Okay. I promise." She hung her head, her hands dropping to her sides limply.

I didn't deserve her, I never had, and I never will. The darkness I held inside me swallowed everything she gave me whole, never allowing the warmth she provided and the love she exuded to linger.

I was still a monster after all.

* * *

A/N: So, Edward's not really a nice guy and obviously has some daddy issues. I wonder if a visit to Carlisle will be able to straighten him out.

Special thanks to **Tarbecca** for recommending this story for the Fic Dive Campfire over on _A Different Forest._ It was awesome to see the story getting some attention.


	5. Chapter 5

**You don't see what you possess, a beauty calm and clear. It floods the sky and blurs the darkness like a chandelier. All the light that you possess is skewed by lakes and seas. The shattered surface, so imperfect, is all that you believe."**  
- _You Are the Moon_ , The Hush Sound

 **Chapter Five:  
** **BPOV**

* * *

I kicked at the defenseless tree stump again and again; the deep cracking sound of the wood splitting rang through the dark vast woods surrounding me. A light mist of rain fell down between the coverage of the foliage, dampening my clothes and laying my hair flat against my face. My bare feet were already caked in wet grass and splashes of mud.

My boiling blood began to settle and in its place, a familiar pang of shame and sadness took over. My mouth burned from the cruel words I hurled at Carlisle just minutes before.

I was a monster.

I fell to the ground next to the rotting, abused stump, my fingers digging into the forest floor underneath me. The dirt wedged underneath my nails.

I heard Rosalie's approach miles away, her feet moving at a leisurely human place for a while, giving me fair warning before she infiltrated my solitude.

"Is he terribly upset with me? " I didn't raise my head as I called out to her. She broke through the wall of thick Hemlocks. Her scent, both a mixture of sweet peonies and bitter clove doused in rainwater, filled the clearing. I took a deep breath, letting her fill me.

"Don't both of you ever get tired of beating a dead horse?" She snickered, her mood light and teasing, a stark contrast to my dark and gloomy mood.

"You would think,' I muttered.

She sighed and began pacing the small clearing, her movements meant to make me feel calm and relaxed, allowing just enough space between to trick me into thinking that I was safe from her prying eyes.

"You're ruining your skirt." She commented from somewhere behind me, I didn't bother to look.

"You can make me another," I stated dryly, running my fingers through the wet earth.

"When was the last time you hunted?"

Suddenly she was right in front of me, her pale, long fingers grasping my chin, forcing my eyes to meet hers. She made a disapproving noise in the back of her throat upon seeing the blackness that existed there.

"That just won't do B." She lightly scolded me before yanking my body from the ground. I let out a groan of protest.

"Rose-"

"I won't have you depressed _and_ thirsty dear Bella, you're wasting away to nothing." She lovingly mocked, gesturing towards my waif-like body, as if a good drink would ever fill it out.

"Please."

I rolled my eyes but let her drag me into the woods without any more complaints.

"What happens when Mr. Right comes along and you look like you just crawled out of your grave?" She laughed, eyeing my muddy feet and dirt caked nail beds.

My mouth dropped open. A slew of snarky replies filtering through my mind, too many to just pick one in response to her nonsense. However, soon the aroma of something large and feral drew my attention away. It's heavy pumping heart vibrated through the air. My mouth filled to the brim with stinging venom.

I ran towards it without any other through in my mind. The predator inside me took over, leaving the broken little girl to crawl away in her corner.

I charged at the majestic mountain lion, pouncing and dragging it down in seconds, my teeth sinking into its jugular just as my skilled hands snapped its neck. The beat of its heart taking time to slow and cease its rhythm, allowing me to revel in the feeling of the warm blood as it pumped for a moment longer.

The ecstasy was like nothing I had experienced before. I remember the first time I could actually enjoy the hunt late into my newborn year, a time when Carlisle no longer had to hold me down to the earth to keep me from searching out a more delectable type of meal.

I remember collapsing to the forest floor my body feeling sated, my limbs so heavy and yet light as feathers. My legs shook. When I finally composed myself I was met with the knowing smile of my creator.

I was mortified.

As always, he calmed me, rained down his praise for my control and proceeded to explain the incredible feeling that still tingled through my body.

"It's like being in the throes of passion with your lover, so entwined that you're not sure where they being and you end. It's like everything in the world is complete and you are left satisfied for at least a few moments. You are filled with something alive and warm, storing it deep within you."

I could blush just remembering how he explained the sensation. My virgin ears just wise enough to connect the analogy to the pleasures of the flesh shared between a husband and wife.

He laughed at the terrorized look on my face, pulled me from the ground and helped me to dispose of my first 'lover'.

"Think of it this way," he spoke again as we walked arm in arm out of the dense forest toward our home, which at the time, was a small cabin in upper state New York." Do you know of Teresa of Avila?"

Even then, the details learned in my human life were slipping away, but 19 years living in a house of devout Catholics allowed my memory just enough mental strength to pull her from the depths of my mind. It was always the trivial things that remained.

"She was almost the Patron Saint of Spain, a Spanish Mystic, right?"

"Yes," he nodded, "she was also a Carmelite nun and a very accomplished author."

I remember laughing at him. "Did you two ever meet Carlisle? You speak of her as if you were a devout follower of her work."

He chucked next to me, giving my arm a small pat. "Unfortunately, we never crossed paths. I had taken passage to America already with the Spaniards who were looking to explore along the Atlantic coast. I didn't hear of her works until she had already passed in 1582. It was mystical thought and her writings on the ascent of the soul that fascinated me."

"And what did she have to say? I'm afraid I don't recall."

"She wrote of the _Devotion of Ecstasy_ , a consciousness of being where the body disappears. Your senses cease, all memory and imagination is absorbed in God. Intoxicated by him. Your body and spirit are thrown into the throes of sweet, happy pain and encompassed by a fearful fiery glow. You are strangled by it, your body lifted into space."

We had stopped walking and my eyes grew wide, entranced by his words that encompassed my feelings towards the out of body experience impeccably. His words were like a gleaming light of realization.

"You reach a climax of mystical experience, only to awaken from your trance to a reactionary relaxation, your body filled with the union of God."

I hung on to every word he said, feeling like I could cry, scream and laugh all at the same time. I could feel that exact sensation of the fullness of the union pooling inside me.

I reached up and touched my blood stained lips, a gasp finding its way from under my fingers.

"So-", I paused, hesitant to ask my next question. Carlisle's eyes took in all my innocence with interest of his own. "Is this- I mean could this be our connection with God? Is hunting and drinking our communion?" My voice shook.

His face remained calm, his eyes sparkled with an acknowledgment that finally another creature could wonder the same things he did. As a Pastor's son nearly a century ago, he never seemed to lose his devotion to a mighty power.

"We can never know what the omnipotent plans for our connections to Him Isabella, but in this way, in the devotion of ecstasy, I feel my faith most strongly restored."

"Is it like this every time?"

He hummed in appreciation as we continued our journey home. "Very much so, but your body will learn to cope better, it won't always be so…breathtaking."

We walked in silence, my mind wandering in a million directions, slowing my pace. Carlisle tugged on my arm drawling me out of my rapid moving consciousness.

"Come, I have a few books on Saint Teresa, you can brush up on your Italian art as well. There's a marvelous picture of Bernini's, _L'Estasi di Santa Teresa_ , somewhere between the pages."

We ran off in a fit ready to fill our night with talk of ecstasy and faith. It wouldn't be our strangest conversation topic.

"It never gets old, does it?" Rosalie's question pulled me from my memories, the ones that were so vivid it was like watching a movie every time you closed your eyes.

"No, never."

"Do you think the feeling would be more outwardly…" she paused looking for the right words, "sensual, with another?"

"What do you mean?" I furrowed my brows together in confusion.

"Carlisle has explained the concept of a mate to you before, has he not?" She eyed me, her body towering over me from where she stood, her butterscotch eyes filled with some dangerous ulterior motive.

I rolled my eyes at her, "Not this again. You haven't stopped talking about it since 1976."

She scoffed at me, gracefully folding her body to the forest floor despite the new vastly over prized trousers she was wearing.

"You don't find it the least bit interesting? The fact that there is someone out there for you that is your soul mate?"

For a woman whose desire to be loved ended up getting her killed…or almost killed I suppose, you'd think she'd be a little more hesitant to find someone to spend the rest of eternity with.

"Men don't interest me, Rose." I averted my eyes already uncomfortable with the conversation.

"What about women?"

My eyes shot up to meet her amused stare and a cheeky grin.

"Of course not!"

"You know there's nothing wrong with it, love comes in all shapes and sizes B."

"Rosalie, I am not a lesbian."

She threw up her hands in surrender, "Okay. Okay. I was just checking."

I angrily began to rip tuffs of grass and dirt from the ground.

"But can you imagine if you put all that energy, all that emotion that you feel, the rush from the blood filling you, into something…more."

"Like what Rose?" I sighed not liking where this was headed.

"Like sex, Bella."

"Stop."

"Why? Haven't you ever thought that maybe that 'devotion of ecstasy' that Carlisle and you go on about, is actually meant to be externalized in some sort of carnal mating ritual." She smirked.

"Oh, please." I rose quickly preparing the dead carcass in front of me to be buried.

"What?!" she laughed.

"Help with this and then I'll race you home." I dearly wished to change the subject.

"What are the stakes B?" She helped me begin digging a hole in the ground large enough to move the body of my meal.

It was moments like this that almost made me feel normal, besides burying a 200-pound mountain lion that I had just drained of all its blood.

They always managed to do this, one way or another. They would pull me from the fantasy of that sunny boardwalk back into a reality of darkness only made better by ridiculous conversations with Rosalie and dancing to old jazz with Carlisle.

My dead heart hurt thinking once again about the harsh and cold things I said to him. I immediately wanted to run back and embrace him, a slew of apologies already running rampant through my mind.

"B?"

I looked up at my beautiful sister, her golden hair pressed down into damp darkened locks by the rain and yet she was still a sight to behold. She would do anything to keep me from getting lost in a mind full of dead family members and charcoal covered skin. However, even her beauty couldn't keep it away for long. In a few days, she'd be back to dragging my limp body to the bathtub, her face drawn up tight thinking about the heartbroken Carlisle who paced down in his study. She would whisper to him once more how we should let me go, let me slip from this world to the next.

I wasn't mad at her for that. She was right, often the only sane one amongst us. I would have killed myself long ago if I had the chance.

 **-IISEID-**

She had been staring at Rose for quite some time, blank eyes glazed over in thought. It happened frequently. Rosalie often wished she could see what thoughts took her always from the here and now. She would never ask because it was clear that Bella did know she did such things. Instead, her sister just sat and waited for her to return from her inner musings.

As if there had never been a break in the conversation, Bella straightened up, a small but unhappy smile on her face.

"If I win you can't talk about mates or mating or use the word 'sex' again."

Rose snorted as she watched her sister cringing as she attempted to speak the word 'sex' without making it sound like a whispered curse.

Sometimes she forgets that she was only physically a year older than her pseudo-sister due to her tragically evident innocent schoolgirl behavior. There was also nearly 35 years of societal difference between the two and despite living in a new progressive millennium Bella never did seem to catch up to it all.

Although beneath all the invisible blushes and naivety, Rosalie knew that Bella was actually a rebel in disguise.

"Six months."

"What?"

"I'll give it a rest for six months, but really what else is there to talk about when you need to fill a lifetime?"

There was something heartbreaking hidden away under Rosalie's eyes as she spoke, Bella could see it peaking out behind the humor, but neither commented on it.

"Fine," Bella sighed, "what do you want in the unlikely chance that you win?"

The sadness lingered, but an overwhelming look of mischief soon overpowered it in the form of a slow smile that crept up her flawless face.

"One favor, no questions asked, no complaining, no going back on your word."

"No," Bella replied shortly.

Rosalie smiled, knowing that her wayward, skittish sister would likely respond negatively to her request.

"Fine," she replied coolly, "but I may have to go home and engage Carlisle in a long, loud and a quite lengthy discussion about vampiric sexual habits. And of course, we'll want your opinion."

Bella appeared to shrink in on herself; the thought of such a conversation panicked her greatly.

"Okay, deal!" she finally conceded.

"Perfect," the blonde beauty walked passed her grinning ear to ear. "And since there is an 'unlikely chance' that I win, you should have nothing to worry about dear sister."

A small, playful, yet menacing sounding growl rumbled in Bella's chest and Rosalie arched an eyebrow in surprise. She wasn't used to having her harmless and broken sister display such animalistic like noises.

"Last one home is a rotten egg!" Rose sang out like a child before taking off into the dark woods, gone without a trace.

Bella followed in quick pursuit, her body feeling light and strong after her prolonged period of hunger. She couldn't help the smile that formed on her face, a rare feeling of contentment daring to fill her up inside…if only for a moment.

Just ahead she could see Rosalie's yellow hair bobbing up and down, drawn into a loose ponytail. Bella sped forward not daring to think what kind of favor Rose might ask of her if she were to lose.

The clearing where the Cullen Manner stood was just a few hundred feet away and Bella could already see the light that broke through the trees. The rain began to fall harder, hitting every treetop covering, sounding like a tin roof.

Rosalie had slowed as she reached the edge of the forest and without thinking, Bella raced forward to make up the space her sister had put between them with her head start.

It wasn't until she was about to run passed her that Bella realized her sister was standing stock still, her body in a rigid stance. She would have passed her and kept running up to the house but suddenly Rose gasped onto her arm as she was ready to fly by, almost ripping her appendage clean off her body.

"Ah!" Bella cried out, falling to the ground on the edge of the clearing. Rose quickly reached down to assist her sister, several hushed apologies whispered under her breath.

"Rose!" Bella let out a long painful sounding howl, clutching her dislocated shoulder, which was already beginning to mend itself. The biting pains of the venom radiating up her arm.

"Isabella?" she heard Carlisle call to her, concern evident in his voice, but also something else. A twinge of anxiety was there ready to turn into a full-blown panic.

Both Rosalie and Bella turned their gazes up towards their creator. However, he wasn't along.

There in front of their house, Carlisle stood, his hand lightly grasping that of another individual. A woman wearing a long back cap, who appeared to be barefooted.

Bella's eyes widened at the two. However, it wasn't until her gaze shifted to the left that she finally saw him.

Tall and dressed all in black with a head of slicked back, dark auburn hair. If his shiny golden lapel pin hadn't given him away, it was the set of red irises that pried her soul open that did it.

"Volturi," she whispered.

A loud non-human sounding snarl ripped through Rosalie's mouth beside her, her whole body shook.

A low rumble vibrated in Bella's own chest, her eyes stuck to the strangers standing far too close to Carlisle.

"Rose, Bella, it's okay."

But it was too late. Rosalie was already flying through the rain, Bella close by her side. Only one thought in mind.

* * *

A/N: If you haven't noticed by now, I have a thing for Italian art, the Baroque period to be exact. I knew I wanted to show the blood drinking as not only a way to sustain their lives but as this potent and incredibly euphoric experience. It's not just food, it's an addiction and craving that can't be ignored. Saint Teresa of Avila is a real person who actually wrote and supposedly experienced this _Ecstasy of Devotion._ It provided the perfect description of what I was looking for. It's extremely interesting stuff if you're looking for a random Google search, I highly recommend looking her up as well as the Bernini sculpture I reference in this chapter.

In other words, **thank you for all the reviews**! Your enjoyment of the story encourages me to continue on. I myself am excited to see where this journey takes us now that Edward and Bella are about to meet.


	6. Chapter 6

**"My past has tasted bitter for years now. So I wield an iron fist. Grace is just weakness or so I've been told. I've been cold, I've been merciless. But the blood on my hands scares me to death"  
** _I'll Be Good,_ Jaymes Young

 **Chapter Six:  
** **EPOV**

* * *

I had never cared much for the literature that Esme kept stocked and organized in the ancient library, tucked away in the dark corners of the stone castle where monsters roamed and demons lingered. I had already spent two centuries reading a wide array of what she referred to as 'the classics' by the time she got her hands between the dusty shelves of the long forgotten room. I found them to be nothing but smudges of ink on yellowing pages that I flipped through frivolously, one after another, something to help dull the boredom.

One day, amid her forced starvation, late in the first year of her new life, I found her curled in on herself, her shoulders pressed so far back into the darkest corner of the shelving that the wood had splintered and cracked, giving way to her small form. Her hands clutched desperately to a leather-bound book, her head so close to the pages that you'd have thought she'd fallen asleep…if you didn't know that such an angel was actually cursed to never find peace in a deep slumber as long as she walked this earth with her pretty head still attached to her shoulders.

Her lips moved in a repetitive motion, whispering the same line from the page she bore down on, over and over.

It wasn't until I was right in front of her, prying the book from her ghost white fingers that she finally acknowledges my presence.

"What does it mean Edward?" Her voice was deep and sorrowful, her tongue weighted down in exhaustion. Yet her eyes sliced into me, wide and dark, looking as if somehow my answer would set her imprisoned soul free.

I looked to see where the pages of the old book had been cracked open, there was a line underlined in faded charcoal like it was meant to be found. The Italian language wrapped around me as I read and comprehended what my damaged creation had stumbled upon.

 _How could she know?_

I wondered as I read the line again. My eyes shot back up to meet her when her frail grip tugged at my jacket sleeve, looking for my attention to return to her gaunt face.

"Edward?" She pleaded.

 _Please, I need to know what it says._ Her mind twirled in a tornado of bright colors, flashes of her human childhood spent in the sunshine gave way to abrupt shifts to dismal grey scenes of her husband's hands wrapped around her neck blurred by sudden splashes of red marring it all. A vivid memory of blood dripping onto her hands came to a crescendo in her cluttered mind. She was remembering everything, all at once.

I remember the sense of hopelessness that I felt as I finally translated Dante's words, thinking that this could only make everything infinitely worse…could only send her straight into the Inferno to which the book she clung so desperately to depicted.

"And I — my head oppressed by horror — said: 'Master, what is it that I hear? Who are those people so defeated by their pain?' And he to me: 'This miserable way is taken by the sorry souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise. They now commingle with the coward angels, the company of those who were not rebels nor faithful to their God, but stood apart. The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened, have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them —even the wicked cannot glory in them.'"

I thought of that moment now, those written words crassly called out by some unknown power, underlined for her to find. Somehow they brought her comfort, finding some peace in finally knowing what she was. For me, it caused a great perplexity. Dante infuriated me and yet it was the only book I reached for again and again. Like an addict I came back for more, knowing that all I'd find was an undeniable answer to the most profound of questions.

We were cursed, too tarnished to be accepted by God but not dark enough to be received by the devil, forced to spend forever in the in-between realm of Purgatory.

There was only one thing that I will ever be sure of, I am a monster, and there was no changing that.

Together, Esme and I arrived in Berlin. We opted to travel as long as possible through the European countryside before we were forced to take to the air. It was then, in the populous city that my throat began to blaze, venom filling my mouth to the brim with need. My teeth ached in my gums and the demon inside me begged to be let loose on the crowds of flesh and blood.

I had managed to keep my teeth to myself, swallowing down large pools of the stinging liquid every few minutes as we stood waiting to board a plane in Antwerp. The flurry of thousands of thoughts running through hundreds of human minds was driving me to the point of insanity and Esme looked as if she was about to tackle me to the ground at any moment. She kept a tight hold on my forearm.

However, it wasn't until one unfortunate woman lost her balance behind me, causing her body to brush up against my own and bringing her delectable scent just an inch too close, that my self-restraint began to disintegrate. I spun around violently, just a fraction of a second faster than any human was capable of. Even masked in my dark suit and black sunglasses, she knew the moment she met my sneer that her number was up, even if she didn't know what kind of threat I posed.

Rapid daydreams of wrapping the young woman up in my arms ran through my mind as panic began to race through hers, her heartbeat pounded in my ears. I longed to crush her body to mine, just enough to hear that sickening _crunch_ of her bones splintering beneath her flesh, before driving my incisors into her jugular hidden so temptingly by the smooth white skin of her neck.

Some inhuman sound erupted from my mouth. Esme's other arm suddenly wrapped around my waist, just tight enough to warn me that my behavior was not going unnoticed. Several bystanders watched the scene play out before them, their eyes flashing back and forth between the psychotic man in black and the wide-eyed girl.

The woman's thoughts flicked wildly through her mind, her self-preservation told her to get as far away from me as possible…quickly. Meanwhile, Esme had begun to apologize profusely for 'my husband's behavior'.

"He gets so temperamental when he's hungry, you know how simple-minded men can be my dear." She smiled warmly, trying to capture the girl's attention with her flawless German accent and lighthearted nature, to make everything seem as normal as possible.

The woman laughed cautiously, her eyes lingering on mine, encased in tinted glass. If she could only see how black and menacing they were underneath, she would really have something to scare her.

We boarded quickly, Esme dragging my raging body along behind her. I couldn't help but allow my gaze to follow the woman who had the lucky fortune of coming into my direct line of consciousness. I closed my eyes and heard nothing but the roar of her blood pumping deliciously through her veins and into her heart. I thought about leaning over her, tearing it from her chest and making it my meal, watching as the light left her eyes.

Once she was out of view, stuffed away in Economy seating, the air cleared around my head and I was suddenly aware of the horrible mistake I'd made in allowing my hunger to escalate this far, leaving it ignored even as we prepared for our intercontinental journey. Even sitting in an isolated first class couldn't keep the scents and the rush of voices from getting to me. I could feel the life pulse around me.

A low rumble started in my chest and escalated several times throughout the flight. Esme was seething, not able to rein in her annoyance of my irresponsibility. Her hand remained clamped down on my forearm throughout the flight, her nails embedded in my skin sending painful spasms up my arm, but it kept me from murdering every man, woman, and child within reach.

"I don't care what you do when we get off this plane, but you better find something to eat before our connecting flight Edward." She hissed, pushing her nails in deeper as we descended into Heathrow. It was the closest thing I'd ever heard to a growl coming from my lovely Esme's mouth.

I growled loudly back at her tone. It escaped notice from the passengers, the primal noise thankfully drowned out by the sound of the airplane's tires hitting the tarmac.

My inner beast screamed at me to reprimand my creation, remind her that I was her Sire and I could end her life with ease if she dare speak to me like that again.

But I swallowed the thought along with another mouthful of venom; trying with everything I had left to regain a hold of myself. I disappeared as soon as the plane door was unlocked, not a single human noticing me as I passed by in a blur.

I found myself, teeth-deep in the neck of a baggage worker, who had the unfortunate fate of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His mind had been on a loop of filth, hazed over with marijuana and some strong bottom shelf liquor. But it only slightly tainted his smell, what hid underneath the intoxicants was much more potent to my palate. He struggled for just a moment, too lost in his high to comprehend what was happening, before finally giving in to the ultimate out-of-body experience. The large mouth-filling gulps I was consuming brought his heart to a stop in record time.

The monster inside purred in satisfaction as a pure and all-encompassing euphoria spread through my entire body, wracking up my spine, over my head and down to my toes. Just like every time before it almost brought me to my knees, an otherworldly experience unlike any other. It was heaven in my burning hell.

I sucked him dry, even taking in a few pulls of the congealed mess that remained behind after nothing was left to pull in my mouth. I hung onto him for a moment longer, allowing my fingers to push into his skin the same way I had wished to abuse the blonde German girl. I relished in the feeling of the tissues caving in easily at my manipulation, holding on to the last licking sparks of pleasure that consumed me.

"Fuck," I muttered, finally releasing him from my grasp. His cooling body fell to the ground, his blood lingered on my fingertips. I sucked them dry.

I wanted to lie down and feel the pounding of the blood through my body, reveling in the post-bliss desire that left me tingling, but there was no time to savor the moment.

One hasty deposal later, I was next to Esme in line to board the next plane, my Ray-Bans back on my face, concealing the truth of what I was from the little humans that ran around the crowded terminal. I wrapped my arm around her waist pulling her close, feeling possessive and a little unruly.

She stiffened in my arms, not speaking to me until we landed hours later in rainy Seattle. But she was never silent to me for long; her mind would always be an open book. She wondered if I felt the slight turn that moved in the air around us as we stepped off the plane.

I knew exactly what she meant, but I would never tell her that my chest had begun to ache again the moment we touched down in this foreign place.

"Are you really going to act this way the entire time?" I grumbled, my hands gripping the wheel of the rental SUV a little too harshly. I heard the metal creak underneath the pressure.

She ignored me still; reaching down to pull the shoes I forced her to wear from her feet. She found footwear offensive.

"Esme!" I growled filling the enclosed space with hostile energy.

"What?!" She yelled back, finally turning to stare at me with her blazing Amber eyes.

"Answer me." It was nothing short of an order.

"Why? You won't like what I have to say anyway." She shot back.

The rumbling grew louder as I plucked out the grievances from her vulnerable mind.

"You know what I am Esme. I can't change that."

We always circled back to this; the same conversation came and went many times over the last seven decades together.

Esme, the vampire I had created from my own devil's spawn venom, was nothing like me. Besides her sweet nurturing and gentle disposition, there were fundamental differences that kept us at odds.

I had been feasting on human blood for over two hundred years before she came along. With a creator like Aro, there was no other way to live. You hunted, you feed, and you did it all over again. I lived for the frenzy that came with every drop of red liqueur. Even more, I craved the hunt, the power, the dominance and above all, the fear. There was something about hearing someone plead for their pathetic lives played out on repeat like a broken record in their chaotic minds.

It turned me on, drove me crazy, and became the fuel for my otherwise dark and meaningless existence.

Although over the decades all of that became tedious. Now their cries and pleas annoyed me, their lifetime of memories were repetitive, and even the dominating power lost its luster. However, I could never curb the desire to return to that sweet ecstasy. I wanted it more than anything.

Esme didn't conform to my coven's way of life.

Because I knew no other way to teach her, she fed freely on human after human for her first nine months in this existence. Gorging on delicate Italian skin and blood alongside us. But as the bloodlust dialed back to a simmer, she became distraught with shame and disgust for what she had become.

I tried everything to get her to eat for the next three months of her newborn year. But as time dragged on, she became more aware of the dozens she had slaughtered; she fell further into herself, her body caving in, and her eyes the color of a darkened hell. I pleaded with her, but all she could see was the blood staining her hands.

Aro demanded I feed her or he would take her hunger away with a more permanent solution.

I was filled with more vehement emotions than I'd ever felt in this post-heartbeat life, both distressed and violently angered by her stubbornness. She was nothing but a child, too young and stupid to know anything about how our world worked.

With this frustration fueling me, I dragged her into the woods behind the small city we existed in and threw her to the ground. Her eyes looked up at mine, hers were black with sadness and hunger, and mine was a matching shade from hopelessness and rage.

"If you're going to act like a pathetic human than you can eat like one," I remember growling at her broken form.

The idea had been inspired by the story of a long-ago visitor who once roamed our halls. I had remembered Aro telling me of the year or two he had spent amongst us within the walls of the castle. My father spoke highly of him…Carlisle. He wasn't special in any way that mattered to the court but became a fascination of my father's due to the incredible self-discipline he had mustered together to combat the forever-tempting bloodlust that plagued each of us. He sated his hunger in an uncommon and altogether unappealing way…he feasted solely on animals.

I had not wanted that life for Esme, my only creation. For her to never feel the euphoric rush of the feed again made me even more furious at her behavior, for if you didn't possess the blood, what did you have in this life?

I was through with caring about her happiness though; I only looked to find a way to spare her life now. Little did I know that only a greater sense of happiness, one that she had not known in her first nine months, would quickly follow along with her diet change.

However, with her happiness came discontent amongst the two of us.

She fought with me constantly, begging me to rethink my way of life and live with her in carnivorous bliss. I would tell her it was all fucking nonsense and that I was never going to end up being the good guy who rights his wrongs. That just wasn't in my cards and it drove her sanity to the brink.

"You always want to paint yourself as the demon-"

"Enough," I growled, pushing the accelerator as far down as it would go, shooting the car forward along the rainy highway.

"You won't even try! How do you know-"

I jerked the car to the shoulder of the mountain pass we were driving along, the scenery reminiscent of the spot where she once threw her body off a cliff, hoping for death.

The wheels sputtered and skidded along gravel as the car struggled to keep up with the sudden speed change, before coming to a complete stop.

I threw the car into park before roughly yanking Esme's arms into my unforgiving grasp. My fingers digging in mercilessly as I pulled her to face me. I forced her body to strain over the console separating us.

"How many times do I have to tell you what I am? How has it not sunk into that pretty head?" My voice barely sounded human as I let the frustration and primitive vexation roll over me. The loving, tender caretaker slipped away as I tightened my grasp.

"You're hurting me, Edward." Her voice in comparison to mine sounded small, full of trepidation that only showed itself in this strong woman when the assertive dominate demon barred its teeth and sunk its fingers into her flesh.

"Why are you constantly testing my nerves, Esme? Why won't you just stop fucking trying to get me to be a better person?" I growled in her face.

"Because I care about you!" She cried, "I know that you can't see that inside you there is still a shred of humanity left, but I see it. When you're not looking I can see it. I wish you would just hear what someone who loves you has to say and for once shut your mouth and listen."

Her words vibrated off the car windows, trapped between us in the small space. Our eyes locked on one another both asking for something that the other would never be able to give.

Her mind was silent.

And just like that, all the passion and vehemence that rang out from her was gone in a second. She blinked once, her eyelids weighing down heavily over her eyes. She hung her head like it was physically painful for her to hold it up and looked at me for even a moment longer. Her shoulders began to shake with dry sobs.

My eyes dropped to her writs. Small fractures cracked into her flawless flesh where my painful grip had handled her carelessly.

The shame washed over me in painful waves. My fingers released her and I automatically reached out to comfort her, but as soon as my fingers caressed her cheek, she jerked away from me, sinking as far back into her seat as possible.

"Esme," the remorse in my voice was only a fraction of how I really felt. "I-".

 _It's fine Edward, just drive. We should get there before it gets dark._

I wasn't human and it had been a long time since I had thought of myself as such. There was no shred of humanity left to cling on to. She was blindly looking for a needle in a stack of sharper needles. Why couldn't she see that and just leave me to rot with the rest of the monsters in that cold castle?

I wanted so badly to tell her that I loved her, more than I ever had anything in this life or the one before, but the demon inside growled defensively at the overwhelming emotion boiling up inside me. My lips stayed closed as we drove on, our silence slicing through the sheets of rain.

My chest ached deeply.

-IISEID-

Eventually, our car reached a dead end somewhere along a hidden drive that reached far through the thick damp forests, tucked away in a little town called Forks.

A wall of trees blocked the car's path that should have ultimately led to the address at which Carlisle Cullen, the very man who by coincidence had given me the idea to keep Esme alive all those years ago, resided. One of the Guards had tracked him back to the Northwestern Peninsula, a place that conveniently rained about 250 days a year.

A necessity if you were keeping up the charade of being human.

As we continued on foot, Esme trudged along through the rain several feet behind me. I listened closely to the internal ramblings within her head.

 _If only he would listen to me, he would figure it out._

My brows furrowed together, trying to make sense of her musings as we weaved through the greenery slowly.

Soon the trees became sparser and a well-worn path was visible along the forest floor. I listened closely for the minds of any others nearby, but only Esme's wondering mind called out to me. However, the further forward we moved, I began to smell them. The scent of the vampires who inhabited the land we walked over.

The scent grew stronger with every step, my nose twitching at the potency. I stopped abruptly and Esme walked straight into my back, not paying attention.

"What?" She grumbled at me.

I took a deep drag of the air into my nose, allowing the sweet and strangely familiar scent permeating my space to fill my lungs fully. I closed my eyes, not able to understand the strong and yet warming sensation that overtook me. It smelled like home, a kindled fired burning low, the way I imagined a kettle of tea to smell on a cold winter's day.

"What is that smell?" I took another deep breath.

I could hear Esme testing the air around us.

"It's like you Edward, but-" She stepped out in front of me curiously sniffing at the scent, "but there's something…different about it."

Everyone had their own distinct and distinguishable scent that followed them wherever they went. It was in the air they breathed and the space they occupied. For humans, it was made up of the blood that rushed through their veins and the sweat that excreted from their pores. For vampires, it was a product of their venom, the thing that made them. It was easy to tell when another vampire was near. Their scents were individually very different and yet so uniquely familiar. However, I had never once caught the sense of another that was so similar to my own.

It rattled me, confusion clouding my already busy thoughts as I forced my feet forward at a slow humanlike pace, taking in my surrounding carefully. I grabbed Esme's hand, pulling her reluctant body along with me.

Something wasn't right.

"How many vampires did you say lived here?"

"Two. Why? " I turned to face her.

"It smells like much more than that." Her tongue peeked out from her mouth, running along her bottom lip, tasting the oxygen that clung to her flesh. "There's the strong scent that resembles yours, but bolder somehow, a slight spice to it." She pulled her hand away from mine and began walking closer towards the row of trees that gave way to a clearing just ahead of us. "And there are two distinct others here as well and maybe even a fourth if my scenes are right."

 _The hospital will want me back tonight. Maybe Rick would be willing to take my shift. I need to speak with her before I leave._

"Esme!" I hissed at her as she moved closer and closer to the clearing.

His thoughts suddenly sliced through the air, so loud and commanding that it made my ears ring.

I followed after Esme, a large and vintage looking white house coming into view beneath a haze of humid fog and slow fat drops of rain. I stared at Esme's bare feet as she moved gracefully through the wet grass. The rain dampened her hair, clinging to her black cloak.

 _What could this be able?_

The man's voice screamed out and I winced as the smooth tenor drowned out the sound of the precipitation hitting the ground around me.

We had nearly reached the center of the large clearing, surrounded by miles of forest, towering green Hemlocks rising up like guards all around us. It felt like a different world, so vastly different from the grey stone walls and flickering candlelight of Volterra.

"Hello." Esme's voice called out.

"Hello." Suddenly a man was standing before us on the top step of the grand wraparound porch that encased the first story of the large home.

Without thinking my body had moved the few steps that kept Esme and I separated. I wrapped my arm around her waist, positioning her so that she was slightly shielded from the view of the stranger before us.

The man, who greatly resembled his portrait despite seven hundred years passing since it's commission, smiled at us wearily.

"I promise I don't mean either of you harm. In fact, I believe that it is I who should fear your presence. Although I'm assuming you're here on behalf of my dear friend Aro."

His eyes lingered on the gold pin that adorned my lapel, the crest of the Volturi coven. His gaze flickered up to my face, a strange look passing over him for just a moment before being replaced with another small, friendly grin. Delving into his mind showed me nothing but equally benevolent thoughts.

Esme quickly slipped easily from my side, practically vibrating with excitement. A small growl of warning rose up my throat, but she ignored me and headed straight for the man, not a care in the world or a drop of self-preservation within her. I listened and watched as the memories of Aro and his time spent in Volterra played through his mind.

"I'm Esme, and this is Edward and yes, we have been sent by Aro. However, please do not fret, we come as peaceful visitors here to help you with your newborn companion."

 _Newborn?_

Several flashes of memories ran through the mind of the vampire, who we'd been sent thousands of miles to attend to in his struggles to rein in his newborn. Two new faces came sharply into view, a beautiful and outspoken blonde creature holding his hand, speaking to him softly, laughing with him over a game of chess.

However, it was the thoughts that preceded that had me tilting my head in fascination at the animal-loving man before me. Great sadness was evident when he thought about another.

 _Isabella._

Her name rang loudly in my ears as if someone had spoken it directly next to me.

Her face paced through my mind a dozen times. She was an average beauty with brunette locks pulled back in an outdated style. His memories of her took me by surprise. I saw in flashes the depression, the attacks of strange out of body behavior, her fits of frantic murmurings and her spells of immovable fatigue.

" _Maybe she's not meant for this world."_

I saw the memory and could hear his fervent concern for the girl who must be of his own creation. But what surprised me the most was the duration of this agony he seemed to suffer. It encompassed decades, not months and the severity of it was far more expansive and complex than Aro suggested.

"I'm afraid I don't understand what this is all about."

 _She's going to wish she never agreed to this! Just think about all the fun I can have with one complaint free day with Bella._

The new voice found its way into my head just as easily as Carlisle's had minutes ago. Their intensity greater than any I'd ever felt from a vampiric mind. The rain was falling steadily now. Carlisle moved off the porch to embrace Esme's hand, which had been outstretched at some point in a greeting. I'd lost track of the moments as I looked towards to trees where the woman's thoughts screamed for my attention.

Something seemed…off. I couldn't tell if it was the error of timing, the realization that we would soon be outnumbered by a small coven of animal lovers, the strange avoidance of Carlisle's thoughts, or the fact that the air had grown thicker around him and Esme as they finally joined hands.

* * *

A/N: Sorry for the delay in this post. The real world has been hassling me. I hope you enjoyed a deeper introspection into the growing mystery that is Edward. But the Prince is about to meet the girl who's lost her mind... As always, let me know what you think.


	7. Chapter 7

**"I Am just an image of something so much greater. I am just a picture frame, I am not the painter. Where do I begin, can I shed this skin. What is this I feel within. It's only love, it's only pain. It's only fear that runs through my veins. It's all the things you can't explain. That make** **us human"  
** - _Human,_ Civil Twilight

 **Chapter Seven:  
** **BPOV**

* * *

On a very blustery blizzarding Christmas Eve night in 1928, Carlisle and I sat next to each other watching a blazing fire and the snow falling in thick sheets outside. We were living in the mountains of Montana, our home nothing but a small two-bedroom cabin. I had strung lights on an evergreen that Carlisle brought home, but the violent winter storm had stolen all the electricity from the house, plunging us into darkness. We were left to stare into the warm flames and keep each other company.

On our small love seat we sat side-by-side, my feet curled up underneath me, my head resting contently on my sire's shoulder. He read from the book in his lap, _The Fir-Tree_ , his smooth and quiet voice filled the small cabin with just as much warmth as the raging hearth.

 _"'Rejoice in thy youth,' said the sunbeam; 'rejoice in thy fresh growth and in the young life that is in thee.'"_

His voice fell away as the wind picked up outside, battering against the wooden walls that protected us from the fierce weather.

I grabbed his hand, intertwining our fingers together tightly. The deep sadness that was beginning to linger inside me more and more began to fill my insides as I longed for memories of Christmases past. But, as always I found nothing but darkness inside my head.

"Please," I whispered, "will you tell me a story?" I kept my eyes transfixed on the flickering fire, feeling too cowardly to look him in the eye and tell him what I really wanted to hear.

But he knew. He always knew.

"Hmm," He hummed in contemplation, slipping his free hand around my waist to pull me closer to him on the couch, allowing me to feel safe and unforgotten. "Do you remember when you first joined me and I explained to you that there was a greater power that existed in our world?"

I nodded my head, recalling vaguely of which he spoke.

"Yes, well I'm not sure I've ever truly had a moment to explain to you who they are or what they do. I know you're looking for a tale of my Christmas pasts before I had you to keep me company," he squeezed my waist playfully and I couldn't help but smile. "But I think it best to tell you about the year I spent Christmas amongst the Volturi."

And so he began his tale. A gruesome story about cold walls that encased a castle buried deep underground beneath an ancient Italian city. Where the most inhuman creatures stalked the halls with eyes the color of sin and screams filled the air acting like clockwork.

"Christmas was celebrated by packing a grand dining room ten times the size of this cabin, with a hundred of the most unlucky souls whose hearts still beat. They were all shapes and sizes, men and women from all backgrounds and nationalities."

At this point in his tale I had sat up, my hands clinging to the cuffs of his shirt, my eyes captured but his serious and intense gaze as his story turned my insides into knots, an all but forgotten physical feeling of nausea rolled over me in waves.

"Had I known what was to become of this group, I would have left that very night. Of course, I had known that they feed on humans to sustain their lives, but until that moment I had never seen such a massacre ensure…merely for pure enjoyment."

He looked away, the remembrance too much for my sire to recall.

"Why did they do it?" I finally asked.

His eyes snapped back up to mine. He pried my hands away from his shirt taking them into his own, squeezing tightly. He looked at me like he was afraid to answer my question.

"It is very important for you to know Isabella that these vampires are not like me, they are older than most other things on this earth and they have an army of the most powerful and gifted individuals inline to serve them. You could go your whole existence without meeting a single member of the court, but if you do, you must remember that life, whether your heart beating or not, means nothing to them. Their hands are stained with blood, their hearts are caved in stars and their eyes are gateways to hell."

I had never met or seen a member of the ruling vampiric body since my creation, but I had heard enough about them to know that wherever they showed up, a trail of blood and fire followed.

Stories of their black-clothed bodies and extraordinary abilities were told like fairytales to newborns, although there were no happily ever after's when it came to these men in black. Of that Carlisle made sure I knew.

After that Christmas Eve night, Carlisle often told me and then Rosalie about his time spent among the court hundreds of years ago, each tale as spine-chilling as the last.

"They were brilliant men lost to a base desire," I recall him saying when I once asked why he ever ventured to such a place. "I thought they would have the answers I sought out for the meaning of our existence, but alas it will always return to the bloodlust for them."

But the blood lusting men had found us. They were here, holding my Maker's hand, looking like dark fallen angles ready to corrupt the world for stealing the favor of their Lord.

The immediate panic and fierce defensive nature that my body naturally produced in times of imminent danger rushed through my venomous veins, urging me to fight. It's what caused Rosalie to fling herself into the air ready to attach the most lethal and mysterious vampires without a thought of worry. It was my resounding internal call for self-preservation that ultimately pulled me after her, to keep my sister from getting herself destroyed.

She moved like a blur, but I was quick on her heels, my body pouncing once again. My mind stuck in a reel of déjà vu as I tackled my sister to the ground much like I just had the mountain lion that I could still taste on my breath.

I managed to wrestle a wet and growling Rose to the grass, my body constricting around her like a vice, begging my appendages to use as much power as they had ever had before to keep her in her place if only for a few seconds more.

Just ten feet away, the Volturi man had taken his own aggressive stance, pulling his companion away from Carlisle, pulling her around his back. In a matter of 10 or 11 seconds, we found ourselves in a battleground, staring down the power of beasts.

The man let out a feral growl of his own in our direction, his body lowering into a defensive crouch, as Rosalie wretched her body in my arms and snapped her teeth out at him.

A small part of my feral nature barreled through the reserve of my mind and I bared my own sharp teeth, letting out a roar that mimicked his, a sound that I barely recognized as coming from my small, sickly looking body.

His eyes held onto mine, not daring to miss any movement I made. I returned the intense stare with one of my own. An unspoken war raged between our gazes and low rumbling growls. Everything was taken over by ruby red and deep topaz.

My body began a strange dance in reaction to the intense stalemate between the man in black and myself. Our connection raged with aggression, the roaring fire that began to irrupt from the crown of my head to the tips of my toenails was like nothing I had ever felt before…electrifying. I felt alive, like a spark ready to set ablaze.

The man in his three-piece suit and gold cufflinks seemed to become increasingly frustrated and agitated as our battle continued, but my own stance was starting to weaken. My arm, still slowly mending from my run in with Rosalie could barely hold back the struggling vampire I had pinned to the ground.

Carlisle finally interjected himself, stepping directly into the middle of our 'no man's land'.

"Enough Rosalie, Isabella," his voice a forceful and severe command that we were helpless to disobey.

Rosalie fell still in my arms and I reluctantly let her go. We rose with grace and much hesitation, a snarl still fully present on my sister's beautiful face.

While she sneered, I held my gaze firmly on that of the man standing tall and powerful before me.

For the first time, as I pushed away from the animalistic aggression, I realized how handsome he was.

He had the jawline of Rudolph Valentino and all the intensity of John Barrymore, a true Mr. Jekyll if I'd ever seen one. His slicked-back hair was thick and dark with a glint of red undertones that seemed to only intensify the rouge of his irises that were a simple reminder of how this man sustained his existence. The authority in his towering, sturdy but lean body was evident by the way he held himself, every tendon and muscle pulled tight underneath the fabric of his suit.

If there had ever been a man to look at, this was him.

I would have laughed at the thought if my senses weren't still screaming at me to run as far away as I could from the demon with the red eyes. If I weren't careful, he'd try to buy my soul…or worse, steal it.

"Edward, stop." The woman behind him pleaded, her arm resting firmly on his bicep, which looked as if it would bust the seams of his suit jacket at any moment.

"Carlisle?" Rose barked out through the rain that was now falling in sheets around us. A deep thunderous boom rang through the mountainsides and echoed through the forest surrounding us.

"Everything will okay Rosalie, they mean us no harm. I believe there's been a simple misunderstanding between old friends."

"Edward, you'll only make things worse." The woman continued her begging as the man in black who now had a name, Edward, continued to growl a three of us, but his eyes remained trained on me.

"Edward, we truly mean no harm or disrespect. My daughters are very protective of me as I am sure you are aware, being a sire yourself."

A strange look passed between Carlisle and the barefooted woman of whom he spoke. His glance lingered for longer than appropriate for the situation and she returned the gaze with a vigor that had me furrowing my brows in confusion.

At the urging of the woman and Carlisle's insistence the man, Edward, finally rose to his full height but the snarl, similar to the one Rose wore, on his fiercely beautiful face remained, his eyes still sending hot lashes against my skin as he glared at me.

"Let's go inside before we all drowned out here," Carlisle spoke over the loud pounding of the rain. It soaked us to the bone.

"I'm not stepping foot anywhere that those two are," Rosalie snapped, her teeth clenched together.

"Rosalie!" Carlisle yelled, causing both my sister and me to jump slightly, the tone unfamiliar and unnerving coming from his mouth, "I said enough."

Our creator looked like a madden arch angle with his fierce dark eyes widened in anger, his stance strong and commanding and his words full of authority, leaving no room for question.

I grabbed Rose's arm and shifted her towards the house, no longer being able to stand the insanity of both Carlisle's demands and Edward's continual glare in my direction.

I could only get my sister as far as the foyer before she grounded her feet and refused to move. All my energy had been used to keep her from attacking the creatures in black and I was beginning to feel the effects.

Evan a vampire can ache.

The grouping of Carlisle, Edward, and the woman followed behind us. The door seemed to shut with a deafening 'click', the way I imagined a prison cell door closes, locking a prisoner behind. No way out.

The heavy breaths of all five vampires rang unnervingly throughout the small foyer. A pungent aroma of something deliciously fresh came to me. I could feel my stomach turn at the sudden realization that it was wafting off the breath of the man. No doubtable a product of his most recent human meal.

However, beyond the blood, I found myself captivated by how amazing the pair smelled, especially Edward. It was a strange scent that seemed so familiar yet widely unknown to my palate that it left me reeling, my head seemed to spine and my hands began to shake.

I held onto Rosalie tighter.

"Should we sit?" Carlisle finally spoke.

The silence between us was louder than the pounding rain on the rooftop.

"Perhaps somewhere that won't take the casualty to our dripping." The woman was the first to answer.

Somehow, we found ourselves seated at our dining room table, a vintage piece from 1899 which had made it through WWI in a European diplomat's house before finding its way to our first home and every other since then. I sat between Rosalie and a strangely calm looking Carlisle, who offered towels to everyone as we had started to form our own puddles where we sat.

My face seems to be burning me alive, and I knew if I looked up from my shaking hands, I would find the man's eyes still locked on me. I shifted in my seat like a human under interrogation. However, he hadn't even spoken to me and I was already feeling like I would tell him all my secrets.

Carlisle placed one of his hands on mine underneath the table where I had them hidden away in shame. There must have been an unspoken agreement between the three of us that there could be only one reason why the Volturi would be sent to see us.

It was my fault they were here.

"Now that we've all calmed ourselves I believe proper introductions are in order." He paused for a second and I could almost sense the tension in the room pulse around us. "I am Carlisle Cullen and this is, for all intents and purposes, my family." He nodded towards Rose and myself although I still refused to raise my head.

"This is Bella Swan and Rosalie Hale, both member of my coven, made from my own being."

I hated how technical he made it sound like we were test tube babies.

"And neither of whom have been newborns for decades. Bella is over a century old and Rose was changed in 1952. So you see what I mean when I say that I'm not sure I understand what you were speaking of upon your arrival. If my thoughts are correct, you've been sent on false pretense."

"Explain this then." The man across the table finally spoke, his voice fire and brimstone, gravelly and sinfully deep. It was like listening to Dean Martin on our old tabletop radio back when we lived in Montana. The snow falling so thick and white that winter that we were buried until spring, lost in a sea of frozen crystals and an endless loop of jazz music.

I raised my head to see him push an old looking letter across the table. The handwriting on the page was undeniably Carlisle's. The ink was from the Kaweco eyedropper, one of the first streamline fountain pens, which was introduced to the modern world just five years before my death. I still had a collection of them sitting in the attic.

Carlisle reached for the crumpled paper, smoothing it out in front of him. I caught a glimpse of the word, " _ **I am deeply distressed by my creation…**_ " before glancing quickly away.

I never knew that my sire had gone as far as to write the patriarch of our world about the "difficulties" that came with being my caretaker. But just thinking back to those early days was enough for me to hold no ill will over the blonde haired doctor, only greater shame.

"Have you ever noticed that when inside of the walls of Volterra, our kind become less aware of normal human observations?" Carlisle posed the question to the two creatures in black.

"What do you mean?" The woman answered.

"Are you aware of the date? The year even?" My sire seemed to be obsessed with asking others what the day was. I briefly wondered if he knew himself.

The two across the table exchanged a brief look, recognition of the gap in their knowledge seeping in quickly.

"So something as insignificant as time still plagues a 1000-year-old vampire, Carlisle?" Edward shot back to my father.

Carlisle actually laughed at him, his eyes sparkling in the same amusement I used to see when he spun me around the room while a Jo Strafford album cracked on the record player.

"I believe that although time is not as valuable to our kind as it is to humanity, it can still be wasted…and friend, it appears that yours has been wasted. For you see, this letter had Aro given you its envelope, would have been postmarked back in the early months of 1916. "

Edward let out a sudden and beastly sounded growl that seemed to vibrate down the length of his entire body. I watched him rise quickly from his seat, his hand braced on our antique table, balled into a threatening fist. A jolt of electricity sparked through my toes again. I couldn't tear my eyes away from him.

"Do you think that this is funny?" He growled between clenched razor sharp teeth.

Carlisle raised his hands in'surrender' like fashion and I clamped one of my hands down on Rosalie's thighs just as a slow defensive rumble began to work its way out of her chest.

"Edward, please sit down." The pretty caramel haired vampire begged the man once again.

She pulled him down towards his seat, an action that could only have been done with part physical effort and some conscious obedience on his behalf.

"I'm sorry about him," she smiled at all three of us, "Edward hasn't been out in the world for just about sixty years now. I'm afraid he's forgotten most of humanity's social cues."

"Esme," He warmed low under his breath, the fire still sheathing in his eyes. They shared an intense stare that almost appeared as if they were holding a silent conversation.

Finally, she turned back to smile at us, nothing but gentle warmth lighting up her face.

"I'm Esme, by the way. My sire often forgets to introduce me." She shot him a warning glance as he grumbled something so low even I couldn't hear it from across the table. "Thank you for inviting us into your home." She looked around appreciatively. "I fear if I was still able to, I would be in tears by the nostalgia this place has unearthed within me."

"How so?" Rosalie broke her silence in favor of her curiosity and, I'm guessing, for the ease in which this woman seemed to put us all in.

Even I was soothed by her deep motherly voice. For a moment, you could almost forget about the beast seated next to her. I wondered how she had ended up at his side.

She gave Rose another smile, and again I noticed how beautiful she really was, even drenched completely through with rainwater.

Unlike my dear sister, who was a blonde bombshell, knockout, meant for the covers of magazines and high fashion runways, Esme had the most natural beauty to her. She had a heart-shaped face, with wide almond shaped eyes that although dark, were more closely colored to our own, rather than to those of her demon red-eyed companion.

 _How strange._

Her small button nose and round cheeks gave her a pleasant maternal, yet youthful look to her. Like Rosalie, she was truly a woman, all curves, and dips. Her femininity rolled off her in waves and once again reminded me that as in life, I was still the plainest woman in the room. Even the great venomous elixir that ran through my veins couldn't work miracles.

"Well, you don't really get a homey feeling within the walls of Volterra, especially when your whole life you grew up on a farm in Ohio." She looked away bashfully and once again I noticed the lingering glances shared between Carlisle and herself.

"Your home just has so much warmth that I haven't seen since my humanity."

I longed to reach across the table and grasp this woman's hand, checking for heart beating warmth. She appeared so delicately human I wanted to cry.

"Thank you, Esme," Carlisle spoke, "even before Bella and Rosalie came along I always tried to build myself a small space that reminded me just of that, of my humanity. We should all have a place to call home, don't you think?"

Esme shook her head in agreement, her hand raised to clutch at her chest. Only Carlisle could make the undead feel such emotion.

"This is rich." The mysterious stranger spoke again, his sarcasm filling the innocent moment shared between Esme and Carlisle.

"Edward?" Esme reached for him, but he was once again out of his chair. He began to pace around the dining room, my eyes followed his every move.

"First, I get kicked out of Volterra, sent on a wild hunt for some lousy animal lover and his unruly newborn, and now I've come to find that we're over a century too late and said animal lover is now getting wax poetic about the joys of humanity." He sheathed and I stared on captivated.

"I'm sorry Aro has led you astray-", Carlisle began but was quickly cut off when Edward bounded over the table Carlisle's throat held in his grasp in less than a second.

"You know nothing of the injustices of my father."

They shared a second of intense eye contact.

All the air left my lungs at the same time that Rosalie threw herself across me and onto Edward, throwing them all to the floor, a pile of animalistic growls that sounded more like two alpha lions trying to tear each other apart, blared around me.

Their tussle didn't last long. Edward was older and stronger, living who knows how long on a diet of fresh human sustenance

I watched numbly as my sister was thrown across the room, flung harshly into the China cabinet filled with a collection of priceless antique dishes Carlisle and I had collected over the years.

Her body sliced straight through the delicate wood and glass and beyond, through the wall of the dining room, her body finally coming to a skidding halt in the kitchen. It sounded like a crack of thunder, vibrating the house down to the foundation.

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion.

Edward, being rid of Rosalie, who lay unmoving in a pile of rubble in the other room, had Carlisle once again by the throat against the wall. My tall handsome sire dangled off the ground in his grasp. I watched, unmoving from my seat, as each crack began to form underneath the weight of the man in black's fingers. Any longer and Carlisle's head would be separated from his body.

My ears seemed to be plugged, only allowing a muffled slow-motion version of what really was happening to play out in my mind. It was like I was stuck in the bathtub again, my ears filled with water, everything above me shielded by a layer of liquid glass.

Esme pounded on the back of the suit-clad demon, her movements frantic, her nails ripping through the fabric of his jacket. I could tell she was screaming something but couldn't make out the words through the haze. I watched in fascination and horror as Edward's lips moved, speaking back to his creation in a slow and cruel manner. A smile belonging to the devil stretched across his face.

My eyes slide to Carlisle's. They were glassy and distant like he was still aware of the present but floating off in an unforeseeable future. I wanted to call out and ask him what he saw in that unattainable plain. Was it as beautiful as I imagined it to be, full of white light?

I wondered if the demon would do the same for me if I begged.

But just as quickly as the ordeal had started, it was over. With one strange look shared between my creator and Esme's, Edward released his hold. Carlisle tumbled to the ground.

He took a step away from Carlisle, who now sat upon the ground. His hand reached up to stroke the healing cracks on his neck. Edward, looking down at him, yelled out once more, what looked like a single word sprayed into the air, raining down on everyone in the room. It fell upon my ears but the phantom water stopped it from being comprehended by my hazy mind.

I could see Rosalie had crept back into the destroyed dining room; her wet clothes now caked in drywall and wood fragments. Her hair was a twist of knots; pieces of pink insulation joined the snarl of blonde curls. She watched the two with bated breath, her body tensed to spring again.

Esme still clung to the sleeve of the furious man's suit, her eyes darting back and forth between the two men, as they shared an intense stare. The look on her lovely round face was just as much fear as it was confusion.

I was drawn back to the handsome sharply sculpted face of Edward, my mind thinking even now that he looked like a demon ripped straight from hell and put on earth to entice sins from humanity. His brows shadowed his serious face; my body tingled with the heat of the fire that poured off of him. His full lips formed one more utterance, looking like a simple, 'no'.

The two men stared at each other for one more long second, before the demon in all his glorious grace and intensity turned away from my father's body, his eyes sliding past all of us to a place only he could see. I had seen that look before, the way his mouth fell open just enough to taste the air, eyes as wide as a deer just about to be caught by its prey.

It was the same look that I had when Carlisle finally could tell me that I no longer had a family to go home to.

It was the look of undeniable truth, just before your world falls apart.

He said nothing more before taking off back into the dark rainy night.

* * *

A/N:

Hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday and have plenty of Easter candy to snack on as they read this chapter. Is anyone else beginning to see the parallels in Bella and Edward's pasts? What just happened between Edward and Carlisle? Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear are about to get interesting.


	8. Chapter 8

Act 2, Scene 2: **  
"Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red."  
-** _Macbeth,_ Shakespeare

 **Chapter Eight  
** **EPOV**

* * *

It was all too much.

The sensory overload that encompassed my head had me clenching my jaw in a painfully rigid lock of bone and enamel. I could practically feel my skull splitting in two. I wished it would, if only to relieve the pressure of so many commanding thoughts and emotions that raged like a great flood behind my eyes.

On any given day in the castle, my 'gift' plagued me with a consistent low mummer of demurred and monotone voices. Every thought encompassed by one constant hum of desire…bloodlust.

In three hundred years I had rarely walked beyond those stonewalls that encased us in our own scent of decadent killing. I quickly learned to push the voices aside, single out the ones I wished to hear and focus on creating a realm of quiet in my consistently busy mind.

But this, these thoughts and flashes of memory were something altogether different and infuriating. It was like walking through a crowded room of humans. The murmurs turned to screeching babble; the bloodlust would be consumed by desires of other kinds and I seemed to get lost in my own head as I was forced to see everything.

Every memory, every worry, each daydream and even the nightmares.

It circled around me much like the thick forest did to this small clearing.

Carlisle, the man who instantly struck me as the patriarch of this small coven, was an unbearably gentle beast. His thoughts rang with a tenor of tranquility that reminded me of Esme but even more amplified. A lifetime of resistance had no doubtingly made him so.

His thousand years of memories were clear and demanding, a peculiar anomaly when compared to creatures of similar age who lingered around Volterra. Where they were slow and methodical with their inner thinking's, his mind was vibrant and concise.

Every thought sliced through me like a hot knife into soft flesh. If I didn't know better, I would think that he was deliberately pushing them one after another into the crowded space between my ears.

Diving into his head was like opening a great novel of unrestricted knowledge. And yet, from the moment he came into view I sensed his hesitancy. While it felt like he was actively working to push and shove each of his thoughts into my mind, I could also feel him holding something back from me.

It was as if he already knew that I would posses his every thought. Like he had been awaiting my arrival and had worked to build an impenetrable wall keeping my all-seeing mind from some mysterious piece of information that lay beyond it.

I wanted to grab him by the throat and squeeze until his eyes bulged out of their sockets and the barrier came tumbling down, revealing all his secrets.

Strike one.

The blonde that had charged at me was even worse. While her creator was kind and lively, she was loud and demanding. Hers was a voice to be reckoned with, or so that was what she thought. The descriptor, _angry man-eater_ , came to mind. The harsh and prehensile inner musing of the girl was an over compensation for something that lay beyond the surface, afflicting her thoughts with a forcefulness, as if she would never be heard without it.

The screeching of her internal voice was like a banshee wailing in the night. It was painful to listen to and yet completely unavoidable.

Strike two.

And then there was her.

Where as her counterparts were utterly boisterous in their thoughts and cogitations, drowning out even the steady pelting of rain upon my head with their taxing minds of colorful Jackson Pollock like psyches, she was their very antithesis.

I had been expecting the tall leggy blonde, not only by her sire's mental picture but also by her garish thoughts that had screamed to me through miles of trees and rain.

She, however, was completely and vexingly silent.

Her appearance in the mind of the man before me just moments ago had seemed lost in a sepia colored fog belonging to a ghost of some passed time. The visage of an early 20th century girl, her dark mahogany hair pulled back in a knotted braid low on her head, a few loose pieces curled in wisps along her temples all held together by a strip of cloth that encircled her crown of tresses, hadn't struck me as someone of the here and now.

Even my lost sense of time hadn't kept me from realizing that the dress that was now plastered to her small and lithe body by the rain, looked more like something Esme had been wearing when I found her bleeding out on the rocks beneath that fateful cliff in 1934, rather than any modern fashions I had come to see present in society today.

The flashes in Carlisle's mind did not prepare me for the creature that flew out of the woods. Her blonde companion's actions were bold but predictable, nothing in her mind was something that I hadn't heard before in our presence. We had a reputation for fear and hatred.

However, it was the small girl who came charging after her that began my downward spiral into uncertainty and hair pulling madness.

I watched ardently as she tackled the larger girl to the ground just a few yards away. I tucked Esme safely behind me, my predatory instants humming through my muscles. I glared in surprised as I probed the space around me, searching for the thoughts of the small thing that barred her teeth and held a vampire almost twice her size to the ground.

And yet, I heard nothing.

In three hundred years of existence, I had never met a mind that I could not see into, both living and undead. They were all open books for me to ponder and read at my leisure. I had met disciplined individuals who were able to block mere nooks of their inner thinking, much like Carlisle. But it was always pointless.

In the end, I would own their every thought, every memory they could recall, the darkest secrets and the unrealized truths they kept hidden from even themselves. I possessed them.

To find a mind that wasn't mine for the taken made me see red.

For a moment I calmed myself with the belief that the girl's thoughts were simply muddled and overpowered by the snarling and mental screams of the girl she pinned to the ground. But as I focused my mind, pushing the flood of thoughts to the side with great effort, there was still nothing.

Blank.

Silence.

A book even I wasn't allowed to open.

Strike three.

The growl that came from my lips was bound in frustration and a rage greater than I had felt in a long while. The vibrations rumbled up my chest and out of my mouth, encompassing my mind and body in a flush of heat that set my cold body ablaze. I lowered into a crouching stance out of pure instinct.

The clouds overhead darkened further and the rain began to fall around us in sheets. A threatening thunderstorm boomed in the distance.

The little girl's mind held more of a threat to me then her body ever could. Images of holding her down and cracking her skull open came to me in waves, as if that would be the answer to this enigma of a creature. But in the same moment visions of being alone in a room with nothing but her and silence sent a chilling shiver down my spine. A feeling so completely human I found my body wracking in its aftershock.

I deepened my crouch and barred my deadly teeth at the girl, feeling bizarrely vulnerable.

To my surprise she roared back at me, the feral sound echoing off the forest that surrounded us, sending a pulsation through my hollow chest that I had never felt before.

 _Kill her now! Rip her head from her shoulders and make the rest of her as quiet as her mind._

The demon whispered next to my ear.

Our eyes remained locked, fighting for power in a silent battle. I wanted to crush her in my arms; making her tell me what gift she possessed that made her mind impenetrable.

I could almost feel my body vibrating with some strange feeling that felt akin to a pounding heart. Although I couldn't remember the sensation myself, I had felt enough human hearts taking their last tell-tale beat to know the power such an organ held over the body, single handedly responsible for pumping life through the veins.

"Enough Rosalie, Isabella," The man next to us broke through my haze with the demand of his creations.

A great pause of hesitancy encased us for a drawn out moment before the brunette untangled herself from the blonde and both girls rose gracefully from the muddy ground, leaving stains on their drastically different clothing.

 _Get up, Edward._

Esme's voice broke through the calamity in my mind, a great sense of pleading for peace was directed at me through a thick stream of confusion on her behalf.

In all the drama of the moment and the rage that had been thrown upon me, it was easily forgotten as to why we were here, why my father had sent us to these human-like beings. Why we had been completely fooled into thinking that we'd find a naïve Sire and his unruly newborn.

I lengthened my crouched body back up to its normal height, a strong grimace replacing my barred teeth at the realization of our situation and the company with whom we now found ourselves with. And still, her eyes never wavered from my own. Mine glared right back just as fiercely, accepting her challenge with pleasure. I watched intently as she took in my features, appraising me with her eyes.

For the first time in my existence, since my forgotten human life, I found myself wondering what a creature was thinking. Could it be possible that nothing existed under that head of drenched hair or behind those liquid gold irises?

I craved for an answer, greater than any bloodlust I had ever felt.

Would the ecstasy of cracking open her mind, watching the hidden thoughts run out of her, be anything like the euphoria that came with a mouth full of scarlet ambrosia?

I wanted to devour her.

In what way, I couldn't say, but just the thought of it sent another wave of tingling down the length of my spine. My body was left with a foreign and uncomfortable longing.

The banter of the others had continued, so did my low threatening snarls, but the voices inside my head were blaring, so all encompassing that it shadowed everything else.

The blonde, hesitant, doctor pushed us all into the large country styled home. With its large pain glass windows and light wooden features, it was meant to feel airy and familiar to those who entered its doors. However, even through the sky above us had opened up and my black suit stuck to every piece of skin it clung to, I preferred the open air to this piece of pseudo-humanity.

I felt hot and discomposed as the door clicked shut behind us, two feelings I can't remember ever experience in this cold and calculated life.

I was beginning to understand the feeling of whiplash as these new and unfathomable emotions coursed through me.

I tried in vain to concentrate on something other than the brunette, _Isabella_ , and her out of style clothing and shaking hands. Nonetheless, I found my eyes boring into her back even more adamantly in the enclosed space, watching as she clung to the blonde's elbow, taking in deep breathes of the disturbingly familiar scent that clung to every nook of the home.

All around me the thoughts of the others continued to run in circles in my mind. Uncertainty, hesitation, anger, and fear weighed heavily on the three who were open to my gift.

However, I was more concentrated on the only creature in the room who was impervious to it.

"Should we sit?" Carlisle sliced through a thick silence that I hadn't noticed was circling the group until the words broke through its barrier.

 _Edward, please try and be a little less…hostile looking. You're scaring her._

I clenched my teeth together again as her warning pushed through the cluster of thoughts and haze of longing that weighted me down. Her mind filled with a vision of Isabella, her body twitching with nerves hands practically vibrating as they clung to the tall girl.

"Perhaps somewhere that won't take the casualty to our dripping," Esme suggested, taking in our ruined clothing that had already started to flood the floor we stood on.

While we moved into a formal dinning room I found myself picking through Carlisle and _Rosalie's_ heads for some indication as to why it might be that the small girl now seated across from me was as silent as a corpse in my mind.

But unlike my father, I wasn't privy to an entire collection of thoughts and memories of any given individual at one time. They had to recall such things into their consciousness for me to be able to hear and even see it.

My curse existed only in the parameters of one page at a time. There was no skipping ahead in the story, even if I wanted to.

Carlisle was still concentrating rather heavily on the wall that kept me from seeing whatever it was that he wished to keep hidden, but his mind had also lingered back to Esme again. He regarded her with increasing curiosity, a slight tone of awe and interest tingeing each of his thoughts.

 _How did this woman come to be part of such an aristocracy of scarlet drinkers?_

 _Her eyes certainly do not match those of her Sire._

 _How interesting to meet a member of the Volturi who possesses a stroke of resistance._

The desire to rip his head from his body was returning with a great vengeance. A feeling of protectiveness along with my usual possessive nature overcame me as I listened to him appraising my creation.

My gaze slipped form the pale face of Isabella, who looked like she might break down into tearless sobs at any moment, in favor of glaring at the doctor. I caught his hand moving underneath the table. The sound of skin touching skin was like grating concrete to my hypersensitive focus.

"Now that we've all calmed ourselves I believe proper introductions are in order."

He motioned to the two girls who flanked his right side, calling them 'his family'.

"This is Bella Swan and Rosalie Hale, both member of my coven, made from my own being."

Without the consent of my mind, my eyes shot back to the shaking girl. Her shoulders had fallen in on themselves as if they could protect her from anything that might reach for her. The demon clinging to my shoulder smiled wicked.

 _Nothing could protect her from us._

More flashes of pulling her small form against my own flooded the forefront of my mind. I wondered briefly if this Isabella would feel like a fragile petal when pressed against my stone like physique.

I was pulled away from the violent thoughts when Carlisle continued.

"And neither of whom have been newborns for decades. Bella is over a century old and Rose was changed in 1952. So you see what I mean when I say that I'm not sure I understand what you were speaking of upon your arrival. If my thoughts are correct, you've been sent on false pretense."

Although he had spoken no differently from the soft, affable tone he had used since our meeting, his words mocked me and suddenly I remembered why we were here and the situation in which we now found ourselves.

"Explain this then." My tone seethed and pulsed around each syllable as I extracted the crumbled and slightly dampened letter from my jacket pocket, sliding it across the table with determination. I concentrated on the thoughts that crossed his mind, looking for any inconsistencies to pick apart his lies.

Carlisle reached for the crumpled paper, smoothing it out in front of him. I followed the small movement of the girl to his immediate right who appeared to glance briefly at the correspondence held in his hands, before looking away harshly, as if what she had seen had burned her.

My frustration with her silent musings was piling up, growing unstable with every second that we sat in the same room. The demon whispered evil words to me, suggestions of varying situations in which we could get her to tell us every single thought that passed her mind with methods that didn't require my gift.

"Have you ever noticed that when inside of the walls of Volterra, our kind become less aware of normal human observations?"

"What do you mean?" Esme asked from my side.

"Are you aware of the date? The year even?"

I turned to look at Esme, allowing his question to rest between the two of us, before quickly realizing that I hadn't been privy to the date since I sunk my teeth into her jugular some eight decades ago. It seemed something so trivial when you had forever.

"So something as insignificant as time still plagues a 1000-year-old vampire, Carlisle?" I spat out at the man who was walking on thin ice with my patience. If he wasn't careful he just might find himself without a head.

To my surprise, the doctor laughed out loud.

"I believe that although time is not as valuable to our kind as it is to humanity, it can still be wasted…and friend, it appears that yours has been wasted. For you see, this letter had Aro given you its envelope, would have been postmarked back in the early months of 1916. "

It was all too much.

My patience had been tried and now I was left sitting before the most enraging vampires that had ever come to be in my presence. I could no longer hold back the deafening growl that had been building since we entered the house. No pleas on Esme's behalf could hold back my anger.

I raised combatively from my chair, bracing my clenched fists onto the grand wooden table at which we had all been seated, some mockery of equality existing in the gesture. As if we would break bread together and call a truce.

"Do you think that this is funny?" I roared at him, baring my teeth for him to see. I would not be patronized and I certainly wouldn't have my time wasted, no matter how non-valuable it may be.

Appearing to realize the volatility of the situation, Carlisle raised his hands in surrender as both he and Esme pressed words of peace through my mind as well as into the room for everyone to hear.

 _I mean no harm by my words._

His voice rang through my head as if he had known that I would hear what lay underneath that thick shiny head of corn straw colored hair.

This took me off guard.

If looks could kill my glare would have stopped a human's heart long ago, but the only other male in the room didn't seem bothered by my hostility. I hadn't felt this exposed by another one of my kind since my father threatened Esme's life as I walked out of his chambers in Volterra and before that, it had been a very long time.

I was left reeling…it was all too much.

What was locked behind that mental wall?

What could you possibly be hiding Carlisle Cullen?

"I'm sorry about him," Esme spoke to the three across the table, having pulled me down by my elbow, chastising me silently. "Edward hasn't been out in the world for just about sixty years now. I'm afraid he's forgotten most of humanity's social cues."

"Esme," I hissed.

 _Please stop! Can we not be civilized for only a moment? These seem like very nice people._

A flash of him passed through her mind. It was only for a second but it was enough to plant the seed of worry inside of me. The doctor was worming his way inside her consciousness and they had only just met.

I could see her own appreciation of him drenching that quick mental thought that passed by, so quick that she might not have even registered it herself.

I furrowed my eyebrows as we held each other's gaze, our silent conversation now a stalemate between glares.

 _Be good, Edward._

She proceeded to introduce us, throwing in a small dig regarding my inability to introducing her, as if I could ever forget that she was my Achilles heel, forced to make me vulnerable for the rest of time. Although just the thought of returning to Volterra without her made the invisible string connecting us, ache at my side.

As Esme talked I allowed myself to observe the girl once again. Her head had popped up from its hiding place to watch Esme as they chatted back and forth about the homeliness of the room. Her eyes captivated me as they darted back and forth across my creation's face as if she was appraising her.

Even without her thoughts, I could almost feel the self-doubt that popped and crackled round her. It was the longing glances she perceived Esme with that had me considering her in the same way.

She was the smallest of the females in the room, but that didn't mean that she was lacking in aesthetic. Her thick mahogany colored hair lay plastered around her face, but it brought out the caramel waves that sparkled in her eyes and contrasted against her smooth pale skin in the most transfixing way. The shape of her face was soft just like I suspected her body would be molded against my own.

In her otherworldly dress, I could make out every line of her body. I travel the length of her, every subtle curve and dip that made up her form captivating me. A twitch of pleasure better known to a man rather than a monster sparked in my stomach. For once I averted my eyes from her visage.

Looking at this Isabella while having such… _human_ thoughts were too much.

"Well, you don't really get a homey feeling within the walls of Volterra, especially when your whole life you grew up on a farm in Ohio."

"Your home just has so much warmth that I haven't seen since my humanity."

 _She's quite lovely._

The thought brought me back to the reality of the table. Carlisle and Esme shared a deep gaze as she spoke of the charm and warmth of the walls surrounding us. I glanced back and forth between the pair, considering them intently.

"Thank you, Esme," Carlisle spoke, "even before Bella and Rosalie came along I always tried to build myself a small space that reminded me just of that, of my humanity. We should all have a place to call home, don't you think?"

 _What would it be like to press my cheek to his? Would it be just as warm as his eyes?_

 _God, is this your plan for me? Could this woman be real?_

 _I feel warm._

 _I feel full._

 _Who is this man?_

 _Who is this woman?_

"This is rich." My cynicism came tumbling out of my mouth before I could even process the outrage that was brewing inside of me.

"Edward?" Esme reached for me but I evaded her touch not wanted to feel her skin against mine after her thoughts had mentally mated with the man across the table.

Once again I was out of my seat, pacing the floor with quick steps and violent turns, my hands swinging by my sides, pressed back into balled up fists, my nails digging into the sensitive palms.

"First, I get kicked out of Volterra, sent on a wild hunt for some lousy animal lover and his unruly newborn, and now I've come to find that we're over a century too late and said animal lover is now getting wax poetic about the joys of humanity." I was frantic, my words coming in waves that barely met my ears.

I saw the unpredictability of my pacing, heard it in my words all through the eyes of the strangers who watched me carefully. As if I was a ticking time bomb about to implode.

And then he opened his mouth; he had to assert himself one last fucking time. I was finished with playing nice.

I was over the table, his throat in my grasp ready to show the doctor just what kind of injustices I could ensue myself.

Thirty seconds later the perfect dining room lay in shambles, the blonde girl a fractured mess on the floor in the other room, Esme practically sobbing at my side as she hopelessly tried to pry my hands from the blond man's throat.

I could feel his flesh popping and cracking underneath my deadly hold. I let the pent of wrath flow through me.

My eyes never left his as I squeezed tighter and tighter, just moments away from putting an end to his gentle mental thoughts, the flashing pictures of Esme, and his pathetic pleading to leave his daughters untouched.

One, two three…

 _Edward, I know you can hear me._

The world around us stopped. My eyes bore into this unknown creature as he called out to me in my mind, somehow knowing I would hear him.

 _I'm sorry it had to be this way, my son._

I no longer could see him before me; my vision lapsed into a memory so clear it looked as if it had taken place just yesterday, not hundreds of years ago. My fingers wrapped around his neck were the only thing keeping me from losing my connection to the real world.

I watched the memory in both curiosity and horror.

 _How could I have let myself be so foolish?_

 _I stared down at the broken form that lay at my feet, red clouding my vision. The taste of him still lingered on my tongue._

 _There was blood everywhere._

" _God forgive me!" I called out into the night._

" _Carlisle, you must not berate yourself for the natural instincts that have led you to this." I glanced up at Aro, my old friend who had led me down this path of blood and carnage._

 _I should have known better. I should have left when I had the chance. I shouldn't have pretended that my own bloodlust would ever be sated to the point of avoiding temptation._

" _Aro, please you must help me. I cannot have such blood on my hands!" I pleaded, swallowing back the thick, stinging venom that pooled in my mouth._

 _I picked the broken boy up from the floor, a young man who was just a few years my junior in his physical form._

" _You should allow yourself more blood on your hands, Carlisle! The cup runneth over with sweet ambrosia and such pleasure divine, even the sins of the flesh could not compare to it. Let yourself live my good man. Stop denying what you really are."_

 _He would never see the dark grief that filled me. He would never understand my abstinence._

 _There was only one thing I could do._

 _Leaning forward, I used all the strength I possessed, praying that God would allow me to grant this creature life even if it was not mine to bestow, and sunk my teeth one final time into the neck of the poor child cradled against my chest. The venom in my mouth seeped into the garish looking wound, his throat practically ripped to shreds in my previous zealousness. With one last push of self-restraint, I closed the wound, mending the skin I had broken._

 _Releasing my lips from the temptation of his fluttering pulse, I cried out into the night air, a sound one part primal roar and one part broken soul. My head fell back, raised to the heavens, awaiting my judgment._

 _A firm hand gripped my shoulder, offering comfort where none could be found._

" _It will not always be so hard my dear friend. You will come to drown out the demons that haunt you."_

 _He spoke of the conscious like it was nothing but a dweller from Hell._

" _Will you…will you-?" I couldn't finish my request. I couldn't say the words out loud._

" _Give me your hand Carlisle, place your worries in my palms."_

 _I hesitated for only a second, knowing there would be no taking back what he would see, what I would request. I took one last look at the dying boy before slipping my scarlet stained hand into his._

 _A moment passed as he saw everything that I wished him to see and all that I did not._

" _Ah, this is a large favor to ask of a friend."_

" _Please, brother," I whispered, closing my eyes, not able to accept it if I heard a denial to my plea._

 _With one last squeeze of my hand, he separated our connection. A sharp clap of his hands startled me._

" _I will accept this boy as my own, and he will never know how he came to be. That is my word to you brother Carlisle."_

 _In a moment the boy was gone from my arms, cradled like a child rather than a man in the embrace of true power._

" _Thank you, Aro."_

" _Hmm, yes," He pressed his translucent fingers against the pink scar that now lingered on the boy's neck. "I think this one will be quite an addition. It may just be me thanking you one of these days Carlisle."_

 _Kneeling in a pool of cooling blood, I watched as Aro turned towards the door, carrying my first and only creation out into the moonlight, the slow beats of his dying heart heavy in the air._

" _Aro?" I called to him one last time before he took off into the night._

" _Yes, brother Carlisle?" He wasn't even looking at me now; his eyes were far way in the head of another._

" _What's his name?"_

 _Finally, his gaze shifted towards me, a broken pathetic monster who would never quite be a man._

 _The corner of his lips raised just a hair._

" _Edward."_

As soon as the memory had begun, it was over.

"No." The single syllable had passed through my lips before I had even realized it was coming.

Gone was the memory and in its place were the same soft and caring eyes that I had just seen through. They were the same eyes that had stared upon the face of a young man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on a hot night in 1771. The same eyes that had turned a brilliant shade of scarlet looking down on me as I felt my blood pouring from the wound he had ripped into my neck.

The eyes of my creator.

A very real memory came flooding back to me. A human memory. My last memory.

My hands fell from his neck in one second, and I was sprinting through the deep northwestern peninsula forests in the next.

It was all too much.

* * *

A/N: I personally hate rewriting the same scene from the other POV almost as much as I detest reading them, but I hope you found the ending was worth this 'other side' chapter. It turns out Edward has ALOT of Daddy issues. Also, what's going on with Esme and Carlisle?

Let me hear your thoughts! They keep me young.


	9. Chapter 9

**"Angels have no thoughts of ever returning you. Would they be angry if I thought of joining you. - With** shadows **I spend it all. My heart and I have decided to end it all."**  
- _Gloomy Sunday,_ Billie Holiday

 **Chapter Nine:**  
 **BPOV**

* * *

The world around me spun sharply. I was a pinpoint on a globe knocked from its bearings, everything turned to havoc the moment that beautifully damned man disappeared like smoke evaporating into the air.

No, not smoke. Perhaps a tornado… Such a creature was the embodiment of a natural disaster.

He was a deadly kind of storm, brewing into a menacing crescendo while unprovoked, but in the bat of a few lashes capable of huffing and puffing into a raging manifestation of powerful darkness, leaving nothing in his path untouched. And yet there was a strong vulnerability to such a force of nature…as it was still an act of God, that wasn't impenetrable to the omnipotent.

He destroyed everything in his wake, but even he knew the power wouldn't last forever. Before long his winds would die down and all that commanding supremacy would be extinguished.

A raging fire snuffed out as easy as a match dropped into dust.

In another blink, a moment, a shift of the air, a look shared between men still unknown to one another…the storm was gone.

But the devastation remained.

He left me whirling, my vision unstable and unfocused, my only refuse came in closing my eyes for the first time since the man in black darted across the table, taking my father captive in his almighty grasp.

I don't know what transpired between them in that quick moment, just a few seconds that seemed to spared Carlisle his head, but as soon as the house no longer held his presence I could almost feel the wood and plaster take a breath of relief.

I held my eyes open long enough to see Carlisle slump to the ground, looking only slightly ruffled by his disheveled clothing. The true damage was only visible underneath the guise of his collar where I caught a glimpse of a garish looking fracture running along his neck. My eyes could already see the venom racing through his veins, beginning the painful mend.

He gave no indication to the fierce sting that I knew pulled his flesh back together. He did not wince or flinch, cry out or moan. He said nothing, leaving the jarred women in the room without an explanation.

Outside of my mind, the room was silent with a pregnant pause of relief and utter confusion, but inside a bomb had detonated behind my eyes. Contorted into a mask of concentrated pain, the skin of my face pinched and scrunched together sharply. A deafening silence vibrated back and forth inside the walls of my head, from one eardrum to the other. The muffled sensation that clogged my ears felt like I was submerged in a pool of water the noises around me faded back into the distance.

"Bella?" A quiver moved up my body at the faint call of my name, pushing at the top of the invisible water that weighed me down.

The temptation to reach out to the noise was incredibly alluring. However, it was easily squelched by the vehement feeling to make myself as small as possible, ignore the sound and disappear altogether into the glimmering darkness that surrounded me.

 _Stay still. Stay very still._

"Bella?" A spark ran across the flesh of my arm, igniting the desire to pull closer to the rhythmic voice.

"Carlisle, please, come to her. Please tell her you're all right. She's slipping away again." A vision of a beautiful and yet stricken Rosalie filled my forethought, the first mirage to break through the depth of the water where I floated.

I can't recall if I had ever longed for a sister in real life, but I couldn't quiet imagine one without her now. What it would be like to exist without such a creature beside me every day was unthinkable.

 _Open your eyes and tell her that! You're scaring her. Can't you hear it in her voice?_

I could hear the panic and desperation tingeing her perfect tone, weighed down by the invisible tide of water sloshing in my ears.

"Carlisle!"

The stunning image of Rosalie morphed almost instantaneously into that of a handsome and gentle-faced Carlisle. I could almost feel his arms wrapped around me, the sound of Billie Holiday swaying us left and right in the darkest of nights. I could feel his lips on my forehead; his hands holding me close to him in the embrace of a lover but one that always felt more like divinity rather than amorous love.

 _Sunday is gloomy. My hours are slumberless. Dearest the shadows. I live with are numberless_

Just as it seemed like the song was hitting its end, his beautiful and chiseled face filled with unexpected agony. We were no longer dancing in each other's arms. Now I was watching helplessly as he dangled from the floor, deep purplish fractures erupting along the smooth skin of his slender neck.

I watched in horror as the usually expressive sparkling eyes of my Creator fell cold and glassy. His face was often an open book to his soul, his eyes the cliché open window. He once told me he remembered his iris' being a bright cyan blue since then, I always pictured the sky when I stared into those vast orbs.

His visage now showed no sky. They were cloudy, unfocused and all at once unseeing as he slumped forward.

"Bella, oh Isabella, my dear sweet child. Please forgive me. I have sinned so greatly and in turn, pushed such wickedness on your innocent soul."

Another tingling of electricity sparked along my arm, spreading towards my bicep and shoulder, across my neck and finally finding my cheek.

"Come back to me Love. Can you hear my voice? Can you feel my hand?"

I could!

Finally, the sparks had soothed into something more gentle and firm. Electric currents turn steadily into the shape of his long dexterous fingers. I could fell the soft pads running along my cheekbone. His touch, smooth yet commanding searched to convey a message through winding path his fingertips forged against my skin.

"I'm okay, we're all okay."

"He's gone Bella, oh I'm so sorry Dear." A twinkling soprano flittered through the haze. It was too foreign to recall who else was in the room with my family.

Slowly each wrinkle and vein settled back into its rightful place on my weathered face, but my eyes remained closed. I couldn't be sure if it was the weight of them that kept them from rising or the growing fear that upon their opening I would find my Creator in pieces on the floor.

"One, two, three, four." His voice glided across my ear.

 _One, two, three, four._

My eyes slide open slowly, the fog covering me dissipating with each repetition of our little affirmation, one that was more for school children then a mentally unstable vampire.

I blinked once, the lids of my eyes felt like they hadn't been open in years.

 _One, two, three, four._

The first thing to come into view was the slivery blonde strands of hair that stuck to Carlisle's face, still damp from the heavy rain that continued to pound against the rooftop. He was kneeling in front of me. My was body pivoted to the side of the chair where I had remained unmoved through the whole of the wicked tornado's catastrophe.

My handsome father figure wore a tired looking smile that peeled over his perfect teeth, his large hand stroked my forearm, while the other reached up to cress my cheek.

Rosalie once told me that Carlisle' stared at me like I was a long lost child he never was able to hold as an infant. I never understood what she meant until this moment.

The other two women still stood somewhere behind my creator, but the only thing in focus was his beautiful face. I was preoccupied in scrutinized him with a stoic face, my mind taking its time to mark off its internal checkbox of survival to concern myself with them.

Head attached to shoulder…check.

Clear and conscious eyes…check.

Mending afflictions behaving properly…check.

All limbs and essential body parts in tact…check.

Only once the last check rang out in my mind did I finally take a large breath, before falling apart in Carlisle's arms.

I tilted forward in my chair, falling forward without any fear of crashing to the ground. He was here. He was always here to catch me.

His long and strong arms wrapped around me like a vice, the warmth of his body engulfing me. He stroked my damp and tangled hair as he held me. I burred my face into his neck, drawing in deep pulls of his familiar scent.

"Hush my Bella. Have no fear, I will never leave you." He whispered to me, rocking out tangled bodies back and forth on the floor of the destroyed dining room.

I hadn't realized I was sobbing until he began to shush me with quiet words of love and safety, but my wails of relief and subdued panic rained down harder each time he spoke, wishing to wash away the tinges of fear that still lingered, that still believed him to be gone forever.

I began to remember the hurtful words we had left each other with before I fled my room early in the afternoon.

I clung to him fiercely, with a desperateness that pulsed through the room. My body shook with wailing sobs that could not be consoled when my mind yelled at me to consider what my have happened had Edward ripped his head from his body if Carlisle ceased to exist right now.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," I choked out between cries.

"There is nothing to apologize for my Love. We are both here and safe. I'm not leaving."

And he didn't, he held me, like he always did. The way he embraces me is like salvation and healing all culminating in a oneness that has been able to hold me together for a century.

He held me like this when I was ravenous for human blood, in the moments after I finally accepted that my salvation was gone, and still until this very day each and every time I collapsed on my mattress in the attic and lost my will to live.

He was my constant.

He was my everything.

-IISEID-

They were like a strange and yet poignant Pieta, a parent embracing his child in a moment of desperation and fulfillment.

That was the only thing that Esme could think of as she stared at the two tragic looking figures tangled on the floor before them.

When Rosalie finally placed a hand on Esme's shoulder and directed her out of the dinning room, there was a small pinch of annoyance that she wasn't allowed to stay and observe the humanity, the kind she hadn't seen in decades.

For every ounce of infatuation Esme found in the them, Rosalie was every bit as exhausted with such a scene. It was one she had seen repetitively throughout her second life. While she was her sister's keeper, tasked with bringing her back to reality each and every time her world fell apart, Carlisle was like the sail to the rocky boat that was her sister's sanity. In the trouble waters of her mind, he guided her, keeping her from capsizing until the storm passed. But even a lost ship in a storm is still lost once the vessel is brought back to calm waters.

Rosalie didn't mean to be rough with the lovely stranger as she pulled their bodies from the intimate scene in the dining room with haste. She felt instant remorseful as she caught Esme's flinch from the corner of her eye as they entered the large library, the farthest room from where her sire and sister remained.

"I'm sorry Esme." She spoke with severe sincerity, releasing the delicate arm of the supposed Volturi member.

Despite her Sire's nature, Rosalie found herself easily letting her guard down whilst in the company of Esme.

Esme had abandoned her thick, sodden clock just beyond the door upon entering Rose's home what seemed like a lifetime ago, now. This left her slender yet shapely figure to catch the light as she was bathed in the lamp's warm glow in the library.

Staring at her standing in one of the family's favorite rooms in the house, Rosalie more than ever could feel Esme's warmth, see her softness and detect something in her eyes that very much reminded her of being a carefree child, always just a glance away from her mother's protection.

"Please," she grasped Rose's hand in her own, it was small and smooth. "Please don't apologize to me, not now, not after what Edward's just done."

She hung her head in shame.

Esme would never say such a thing to the beautiful creature standing before her, asking for forgiveness, but she felt more at home in this house with these strangers, than she ever had in Volterra with her sire.

She loved him so dearly, but the shame that ran through her now made her cursed the devilishly charming and destructive boy who had brought her here.

"I will not ask for your forgiveness for his behavior. The damage he's done to your home and your family is never to be unforgotten, a true violation of your livelihood."

Rosalie stared at the woman in a state of flabbergasting shock. Never had she heard someone, or at least one of her kind speak so poignantly…that is no one since she met Carlisle.

She spoke with the same eloquence and grace, each word chosen carefully to express deep emotions.

"I mean you no harm and I cannot begin to account for the many sins of my sire. And yet I must confess I am even more greatly perturbed by the worry for his whereabouts…even now."

The two stood in silence Esme's confession hanging in the air between them. Rosalie's mind hadn't stopped running since she broke through the forest to see the two deathly figures standing in front of Carlisle. She couldn't quite figure out what kind of creature this woman was.

Esme finally retreated from their shared gaze, turning away from Rosalie to face the large library where the now stood. Sheets of rain streaked down the floor to ceiling windows that covered one wall in the room. The darkness of the quickly fading daylight encased them in shadows.

"I'm not sure what I do now." She whispered more to the room than anyone in particular.

Rose finally found the use of her legs and began to walk around the room turning on a few more lamps, allowing a flowing light to banish the shadows to the corners.

Rosalie didn't respond, instead taking up residence on a leather sofa flanked by looming bookshelves that towered overhead, filled to the brim with hundreds of years of literature.

"Oh!" Esme gasped as she examined the library shelves that not only surrounded the beautiful blonde, but also the rows of shelves that sat in the darkness beyond.

"One can cultivate quite a collection when they have a thousand years to do so." Rose almost smiled at the look of innocent awe stuck on Esme's face.

She stepped to the large marble fireplace where the closest stack of books lived in a neat row kept together by bronze ends that looked to be older than even her.

Esme ran one finger over the spines of the three books that sat there now.

 _Emma_ , by Jane Austen

 _The Dice Man_ , by Luke Rhinehart

 _All the Light We Cannot See_ , by Anthony Doerr

"These are all Carlisle's?"

This time Rosalie couldn't help but let a snicker flutter from her lips. She had a growing suspicion that the delicate woman was beginning to grow a small infatuation with her sire.

"While Carlisle is a man of many tastes, Austen has never been one of his favorites. Believe it or not, Bella is the procurer of most of the titles in this room."

Moving passed the books; Esme continued her journey down the mantle, letting her fingers travel over the three delicate picture frames that took up the rest of the space.

A golden oval frame closest to the books held a headshot of no other than a long ago human Rosalie. Even in the black and white toned photo. Esme could tell her irises had once been bright blue.

She was smiling at the camera the way Esme had seen models in magazines do. She was a creature of flawless being, even as a human. It was easy to see why the girl was so devastatingly handsome in her immortal flesh.

Esme wondered not for the first time today if human eyes were able to truly behold her beauty without being blinded.

Next to her photo was a much more modern snapshot in full color displayed in another ordinate, yet simple bronze frame. From behind the glass four smiling faces stared out at her. Carlisle, Rosalie, Bella, and an unknown blonde man huddled under a large oak. Bella had been swept up by the blonde man, crying out with laughter as if he had taken her off guard while Rosalie appeared to have jumped onto Carlisle's back, her arms wrapped lovingly around his neck. Her eyes were the only to meet the camera, Carlisle's sliding over to the ruckus of the other two, the simple smile cracked upon his face made her insides pool into a warm puddle.

Along side, the awe and burning warmth came another pang of jealously she had felt more than once since meeting this unlikely coven.

How had individuals like these existed all this time when she was forced into the cambers of hell with dozens of creatures more like demons than humans? Why could she not have been found by these enchanting souls instead?

She would have dwelled on the feeling for a moment longer had the last frame positioned just to the left of the group shot not captured her attention. The frame was smaller than the other two and appeared to be much older. The silver was tarnished in two parallel spots, as if someone had held it close to their heart night after night, their fingerprints leaving a mark in the metal.

The image that captivated Esme so vastly was not a photograph, but rather an artist's sketch. Etched into aged cardstock was _Isabella H. Swan_ , her name in delicate calligraphy carved into the ordinate metal.

Unlike Rosalie's snap shot, that although had an undeniable likeness to the woman who sat before her, Bella's sketch was something otherworldly.

The drawing captured everything about the strange girl that sat opposite her in the dining room, hands shaking while Edward seemed to try and bore holes into her skin.

It wasn't like looking into the past, more like a mirror, but even that wasn't right. It was as if the girl had peeled herself off the paper and turned to flesh and bone, steel and concrete.

The long swept up hair, her pale porcelain skin and those dark shining eyes were all still there in the other room. The only thing that was missing was the collegiate uniform wrapped around her lithe frame and the slight tinge of pink from her cheeks.

"Our Bella was the only one of us to go to college while we still had blood in our veins." Rosalie's hand suddenly appeared over Esme's shoulder, reaching out passed her to rest a finger lovingly over the worn spot on the frame.

Esme's eyes slide over to catch Rose's far way look. Esme wished for just a second that she were able to see into a mind like Edward.

What plagued this family?

"Rosalie?"

They met each other's gaze, now almost nose to nose, before Rosalie made her way back to the couch. She sank back down into the leather.

"You want to know about Bella?"

Esme didn't want to pry into the knots of a family so obviously tangled together in a web of mystery and sadness, but she couldn't help her wondering mind. She couldn't help but pry.

"I've never seen one of our kind act in such a way." It was barely a whisper, but it didn't matter how low she spoke. Anything she had to say on the matter, spoke in volumes.

Rosalie sat staring out the window, watching the rain lost in a pool of fresh and stale memories of the struggle of Bella's life.

She didn't know why she felt the need to open up to this strange and supposedly lethal woman, but whether it was her nurturing disposition or her raw and honest eyes. Rose found the words falling from her mouth, unable to hold it all back anymore.

She hadn't known it, but she'd been waiting to share the burden for decades.

"Since I've known Bella, she's always been…'ill'." She said the word like she was tasting it on her tongue trying it out for size to see how it fit. She had never once tried to define what ailed her sister.

"How so?" Esme's curiosity grew.

"Not of the body of course. She is as virile and stealthy as anyone of us given she's feed properly. Her ailment has always been one of her mind."

The women shared a comfortable silence. Esme could see Rosalie struggling to find the right dictations in order to continue. She didn't dare rush her.

"She suffers with a great deal of memory loss from her human life. We all have dull and fleeting memories of the time when our hearts beat, but unlike us she can recall almost none of it. She knows how she died, she remembers she has a family but she cannot recall what kind of people they were, and how they lived or even what they looked like. Bella couldn't pick her own mother out of a photograph if she had one. It plagues her deeply.

"Carlisle tells me she wasn't always this...inconsolable. She of course struggled as each one of us does adjusting to the reality of this life, but she found great comfort in Carlisle as a companion. He could hold her when she fell apart, whisper to her his love and she would remember that there were people in the here and now who cared for her."

Esme stared at the woman, watching her face turned towards the dripping window, morph into that of a heartbroken girl.

"But these days he can hold her for days just trying to calm her down, but she never snaps out of it. She sinks deeper."

"Where does she go?"

"If only we knew, maybe we could stop the cycle of her torment from continuing. But until then it gets worse and worse as the years go on. Every month or so she'll have a fit, something will set her off. It can be as simple as a phrase in a book, a turn in the weather, or nothing at all. Sometimes she's volatile and other times she slips away from us without notice until we find her comatose, staring blankly into the air."

"And what breaks the trance?" Esme couldn't help but ask, the severity of Rose's tone kept her teetering on an edge, waiting for the story to crescendo at any minute as if Isabella herself was a novel too engrossing and mysterious to put down.

Rosalie's eyes slid from the window suddenly, broken from whatever spell of ensnarement her own attention had been held in.

Her eyes widened a hair before beaming dark and brooding the longer she stared at the gentle looking woman. A woman who Rosalie most jarringly realized was not just a kind, inquisitive stranger, but rather a trespasser.

How had her warmth wormed its way under Rose's skin so quickly? How had she spilled the very secrets that Carlisle and her so vehemently tried to remain hidden from…them, from her?

The Volturi.

Rose wrapped her arms around her slender center, feeling vulnerable and very alone for the first time since she entered the room with the woman in black.

"I'm sorry, that's not for me to say." She rose suddenly from her sunken spot on the warm leather couch. "I've said too much already."

Esme witnessing the girl's abrupt discomfort furrowed her brows and took a step forward hoping that by eliminating the distance between them she would be able to calm her of her worries. It was obvious she had upset the lovely girl in some way and she wished to quickly rectify any injustice she may have caused.

"Please don't apologize, if there is anyone to be sorry like I've said, it is me…again. I've pried too deeply."

"No, no, it's just-" She stumbled over her words as she inched around Esme, edging closer and closer to the door that led out into the hallway. "I-I should go check on my family, please excuse me."

With that Rosalie dashed out of the room, leaving Esme alone, confused and feeling even more vulnerable than Rosalie. She was alone with strangers who though seemingly kind were reluctant as any other would be to any Volturi.

But Esme wasn't like the rest; she didn't want to be like them. Dare she say…like her sire?

Images of a ravenous Edward came to mind, his hands wrapped around a handsome Carlisle's throat.

"I don't think you'll have to worry about ever being anything like your demon sire Love. It is quite obvious to me now, that your gentle spirit was inherited. Humanity is much more nature than nurture. Apparently, it also skips a generation."

Violently jerked from her silence, Esme spun on her bare heels in the direction of the dark husky voice.

Standing in the shadows of the library, Edward leaned against a bookshelf, water dripping off his clothes, a very distinguishable smudge of scarlet lingering in the corner of his mouth.

* * *

A/N:

My dearest apologies for being away for so long. If there are any 20-somethings out there who are dealing with the plights of life, you'll know what I mean when I say I've been struggling with life lately. This chapter provided some much-needed solace for me, so I hope it brings comfort to anyone who might be seeking an escape from reality tonight.

A big thank you to all who reviewed the last chapter, I had a wonderful amount of responses. I hope to hear from more of you soon! Hope you enjoyed and I promise not to stay away for that long again!


	10. Chapter 10

"I feel her filth in my bones. Wash off my hands 'til it's gone. The walls they're closing in With velvet curtains..."  
- _Slow It Down,_ The Lumineers

Chapter Ten:  
EPOV

* * *

 ** _~1740~_**

"Edward!"

At the sound of my name echoing through the gardens in the evening air, my head, upon instinct, pivoted towards the familiar soprano voice.

No sooner had I turned my head, did the stabbing pain of a sharp jab flare along the vulnerable flesh between my ribs.

"Ah!" I cried out as the end of Jacob's saber dug into the flesh behind my cotton dinner shirt, billowing around my lunging body, drenched through with perspiration from a few rounds of trying to best the stable boy in fencing.

"Mon fils!" My mother's voice rang closer, evidently unsatisfied with the lack of response her initial call received, promoting her to gather her skirts and work her way through the fully bloomed magnolia trees covering the sprawling estate that was our home.

"Looks like all those lessons are nothing compared to pure strength and natural skill my boy." Jacob cackled, wiping his own sweaty brow.

Jacob had been with us since infancy, his mother was my mother's first handmaid. She felt deep affection for her and doted on Jacob who was just two months my junior. Tragically he never experienced the joys of hearing her voice echo through the summer air on the Mason estate, for she died just hours after giving birth to the tall burly man who stood before me now.

I stumbled backward, clutching my side, my face scrunched up in pain, my face hot with exertion, my tongue tingling to rebuke his win.

I'd grown up beside Jacob, becoming nearly inseparable as aged and yet in society we sat worlds from one another.

For a man born into nothing, he seemed to best me in just about every aspect of my life. Perhaps it was that which made the sting in my side permeate much deeper, becoming a searing indignant feeling that touched my bones.

"Preposterous! I call for a rematch on the grounds of interference."

"Sure, sure Master Mason, another time. Perhaps when mother isn't calling."

He laughed heartily and I lunged forward ready to wrestle him to the ground, propelled by my inflated pride. A 'man of my own era' my mother would have said. Although I'm not sure what that even meant.

Just as my hands grabbed ahold of his collar, Mistress Mason herself made her appearance.

"Oh heavens, there you are Love."

My mother was everything that my father was not. Soft, gentle, and youthful were all words that were often spoken about her as she entered a party or strolled around town. I often wondered how such a woman ended up in Virginia living with a man who dressed her in the finest gowns with a salary earned by war & politics.

She took one look at us, moments away from a full scuffle on the ground, and the deep crease, one I had come to recognize as Elizabeth Mason's cross face, came rising to the surface.

"Edward Anthony Mason Jr., what have you been partaking in?"

I released Jacob who's own face had turned red with embarrassment at being caught out of his hand-me-down dinner jacket dueling with one of the masters of the house.

"Pardon Mistress, we were practicing Master Mason's fencing skills."

"Well, you both look a fright! Edward where is your cravat?"

"Je n'cest pa." I muttered, feeling a little too much like a man to be treated as an infant.

"Tu n'es pas encore trop vieuz pour être battu, mon cher." She scolded me in her native tongue, as she reached down to gather the discarded articles of clothing I had thrown off in hast as Jacob and I had run from the house after dinner in pursuits of more lively entertainment.

"Now, go along and enjoy the rest of your fine evening Jacob, my son needs to escort Lady Stanly home."

"Mother!" I towered over her, in her dinner petticoat that was the same color as the ripening apples in the far beyond orchards. She was a sight to behold. The color glowed against the underside of her heart-shaped face, her hand nestled firmly in the crux of her hip where she held me as a babe. She was a force to be reckoned with, a Parisian spark, glowing in the early night.

My father may have been the man of our home, but she welds the power.

"Now, you know it is my greatest pleasure to have a daughter one day soon and perhaps a grandchild or two before this world goes completely mad."

She often spoke now as if the world as we knew it would be coming to an end, the news of impending war between our European counterparts and the new colonies had been on the forefront of her mind lately. I had a feeling she interrogated my father in his study the moment I retired for the night.

I rolled my eyes, knowing there would be no further discussion on a subject once Elizabeth Mason had made up her mind.

I accepted the pieces of my dinner suit and began making my way back to the main house looming in the haze of the humid night air, arm in arm with an exuberant mother who daydreamed of couples picnics under the lemon trees and bouncing cubby babies in her lap.

"Quite an enchanting summer evening, do you not think so Sir?"

The girl my mother had deemed fit for my future wife had not stopped the run of her mouth from the moment we departed from Mason Manner, which felt as if it were a fortnight ago.

"Quite," I muttered, busy attending to a possible shard of wood that had lodged itself into the pad of my index finger. No doubt a casualty of my swordsmen's duel.

She carried on for another unbearable amount of time, commenting on everything from my mother's dress to the cut of meat served at dinner, to the trim of my hair, before we finally reached her own front door.

The precipice of the night was upon us and had she not been so bloody aggravating, through the entirety of our stroll to her property, I may have tried to persuade a kiss from the girl whose blonde curls, piled high on her head, looked like they may topple over at any minute. Like a soufflé gone bad.

"My greatest thanks for escorting me home Mr. Mason. I do hope we have the pleasure of seeing one another very soon."

"Yes." I grinned through clenched teeth. "Well, I'm sure our mothers will see to it."

I couldn't muster up the will for any more commentary on the subject.

I caught sight of the senior Lady Stanly peering out the front window at the two of us and my stomach soured, the lemon tart for dessert suddenly feeling rather heavy in my gut.

With a brief bow and not even a thought of stolen kisses, I bolted off the Stanly estate, favoring the forest as a quick escape from the fresh hell that ensued moments before.

I silently cursed my mother for her meddling in my affairs. How was a young man expected to gain diplomacy, learn all the world has to offer and mature into a respectable gentleman if he wasn't first allowed to sow his oats in the wide pastures of the new world?

How could one do such a thing with a babbling wife and screaming infants weighing him down from such endeavors?

I pushed the thought aside as the anger boiled too hotly under my necktie for the damp summer air. Instead, I began to wonder if perhaps there was still time in the early moonlight to seek out Jacob for another go with my sabers.

I was already planning out my most successful moves, nearly halfway home, when suddenly I came upon what looked like a man crouched over a dead fawn in a small clearing just a stone's throw from where I stood.

The sight was so peculiar in nature that I didn't quite understand what I was truly seeing at first. I stood stock-still taking in the queer sight before me. For some reason, I found myself calling out to the man as if he was not awkwardly hunched over an animal's caress.

"You there, fellow, you are on private property belonging to that of the Mason household. There is no game hunting on this land. I may kindly ask you to-"

As my words floated over to him, his head shot to attention, like a man startled out of a deep and vexing concentration.

Upon seeing his face my words lost all of their weight. They seemed insignificant now.

He appeared to be a man like any other, a shade too pale for the summer months, but dressed in fine clothing with a head of honey blonde slicked back hair into a delicate style that would have made him look sharp and sophisticated, had it not been for what I saw when our gazes met.

His eyes were unnaturally wide and appeared to have sunken back into his white skin. Where a normal man was supposed to have a pupil and an iris all that existed was blackness. A hole that you could fall down and never find your way back out.

But it wasn't the shade of his eyes that alarmed me the most. No, it was the unmistakable smear of blood that crawled down his lips and onto his defined chin, which caused my spine to quake.

I couldn't look away from the devil that crawled along the forest floor. Slowly I watched in horror as his lips split open and stretched over a pair of blazing white teeth that glistened in the moonlight. His gums stained scarlet.

My knees hit the forest floor.

Darkness fell.

* * *

 _Ring, ring, ring._

The repetitive electric chime made my neck tick violently to the side, my frayed nerves already standing on end. I'd seen enough men strung out on cocaine and methamphetamines to know the sporadic jerks my limbs had been making the moment I stopped sprinting from that house of screaming voices, made me look just like an addict crawling around a back alley.

Looking for my fix.

"Edward?" Demetri's thick and booming voice finally answered saving the cell phone pressed against my ear from a quick trip throw at the nearest tree.

"I need to speak with him," I demanded.

It was the first time I've spoken since I left that house. Left him lying on the floor, left her staring at me like I was the devil himself, the way I must have looked at Carlisle Cullen three centuries ago standing in that forest, so close to home and yet never to return again.

"Can I take a message?" He sounded bored. If only I could feel that same lack of passion and enthusiasm again. I would beg to go back to my throne of disinterest if to dispel such ragged and raging feeling from coursing through my cold body.

I growled into the phone, a feral noise that vibrated off the trees around me, drowning out the steady pound of the soaking rain that clung to me.

"Give him the phone or I'll slaughter this entire town and make your life a living hell for the foreseeable future."

"No need to be so dramatic, oh prodigal son."

How fitting his reference truly was.

There was a long pause as I waited to 'meet my maker'. I tried in vain to compose my thoughts, but the moment his decrypted sounding voice spoke my name I was lost to the fury.

"Edward."

My mind had been racing with so many thoughts as to the scene I had just left, the scorching new memory pushed and pulsing in my head, the rampant voices fading not fast enough as I ran. I didn't think about what I could possibly say to the creature that I thought I owed this damned existence to. Now with him listening, ready to take my wrath, I could only think of one thing to ask.

"Is it true?"

"Of what do you speak son?"

The cynical smile that stretched across my mouth was almost painful. The bipolar emotions surging through me were starting to crack and crumble my long constructed composure.

"So, how did it happen? How did the human loving vampire pawn me off into your cold dead hands?"

There was a brief pause, perhaps a moment of regret but more likely a beam of recognition for him.

Three hundred years I had lived under the thumb of a king wrought with useless power and here he was gleaming with pride that finally someone knew about his greatest hist.

How he stole my soul.

"I'm guessing that if we're having this conversation, you are already well aware of how that happened Edward."

Another piercing growl rumbled out of my chest. My control was slipping, a wire dancing dangerously towards the flames.

"And you hid it from me. For centuries!"

"Your origins are insignificant Edward. You are still a Volturi and you still belong to me. Carlisle had no need for a creation such as you. He truly saved you from the mundane by passing you over."

"Just a pawn to be pushed and played with!"

"That's a mute point son. Now, are we done discussing this? I believe you still have a job to do. Don't think that I've forgotten our deal."

"I don't owe you anything."

A soft sigh rang through the phone. "Don't let your father complex blind you from the undeniable truth Edward. You are mine. Your little whore of a pet is mine and I may not have sunk my teeth into you, but I won't hesitate to rip your head from your shoulders if you forget that."

I had no words left to speak for this leviathan.

"Go fuck yourself, Aro."

"I'll see you soon son. Don't forget why you're there."

If I had blood it would have boiled, if I had tears, angry streams would have wet my cheeks. If I was a man I would punch the hemlock next to me until my knuckles split open.

But I was not a man. I had no blood and do not remember what it is like to cry.

I was an unnatural, surrounded by the very depths of nature. Rain poured around me, the giant hemlocks swayed in the storm's breeze, thunder and lightning filled the darkening sky in an ominous symphony. God mocked me with his shaking skies that could drench me in tears that I would never have to shed.

"Ahhhh!"

The horrendous wail of a tormented animal called out into the air, an answering cry to the rolling thunder growled back.

The phone, a modern-day piece of plastic and glass tumbled out from between my clenched fist into tiny pieces. Five-hundred-year-old evergreens echoed through the forest as my murderous hands uprooted them from the earth, leaving them exposed to the elements around them where they would rot away slowly with time. Suffering just feet away from where they had been planted so firmly just moments before.

Thriving one moment, massacred the next.

Blood.

I needed something more viral, something alive and beating in my hands.

I was running before the saturation of red covered my vision in a homicidal film. I burned for it.

I had tasted the sweet elixir just hours before and yet I felt insatiable as if I had been wondering the desert for days. I was in search of an oasis.

I pushed the reach of my frenzied mind out as far as it would reach, for once longing to hear any pathetic piece of humanity. For in humanity was fragility, bones to crush, hearts to tear open and fresh gushing nectar to gorge on.

The storm buzzed around me as I sliced through the depths of the northwestern peninsula like a starved man. The wind lashed against my drenched body, feeling heavier with every step I took.

It was in the sting of the whipping wind that I was brought her scent.

Ambrosia was the only way to describe the heavy concoction of panic, anxiety and a racing heart.

Her mind came to me next.

 _Oh god! Why did this have to happen to me? This is just my luck._

I found her as soon as I hit the edge of the forest, bent over in the rain on the valley overpass, much like the one I watched Esme fall from decades ago. It was just trees for miles, an empty two-lane road and a hundred yards of mountain cliff beyond.

It was the perfect spot for a life to end.

She was young; too young they would say when she was reported missing a few hours from now. Her own mother would weep and beg and wonder for the rest of her days what happen to her babe. Where did they go? Just like ma mère.

She reminded me immensely of the petite little thing whose neck I'd snapped just a day ago.

Had all of this really happened over the course of 48 hours?

The moment her eyes met mine I could see myself clearly through her mind. I was a monster all dressed in black, approaching from the dark and twisty depths of the forest, a sneer on my lips and a growl rumbling through my chest.

I looked just like my father.

 **-IISEID-**

"I don't think you'll have to worry about ever being anything like your demon sire Love. It is quite obvious to me now, that your gentle spirit was inherited. Humanity is much more nature than nurture. Apparently, it also skips a generation."

I had only been allowed a brief moment to observe the creature I created, as she swam in the sea of her own thoughts, lost in the sun of her innocence. The only place it could shine when she was with me.

She hid a lot from me, even with her mind being an open window, one in which I could look into as I wished. But it was a window I'd never be able to open, never privy to the real things that happened beyond the glass. I wasn't an empath and I felt little emotions myself besides rage and boredom. I was uncomfortable with the magnitude of her feelings. I couldn't even handle feeling so many inside me now.

I was always just a few feet away, never quite reaching her when she swam in the dark waters of melancholy or even comprehend her rare moment of elation.

Like these strange human-like vampires who dwelled in a home created by care and affection, she had retained the complexities of humanity. Something I long ago lost.

Her face was a mask of both confusion and heartbreak as she glanced towards the door where the blond feral girl had left through, leaving my love once again alone in a dark library.

She was devastating.

"Edward!" She cried, placing her hand over her chest, a gesture from a time when the organ underneath the skin there still beat. A glimpse of my mother in the last hour of my life calling my name through the summer air echoed around me.

She remained locked in her spot in front of the marble fireplace, her mind a mess of mixed emotions I would never unweave.

However, there was a growing need for comfort that exceeded everything else. I saw the worry that had been lingering along the forefront of her thoughts since I left them all in the dining room.

Almost immediately she was wrapping her arms around my dripping form.

Her very familiar smell was everywhere, surrounding me in a warm blanket of relief, for a moment. I sunk into it. It was the most intoxicating of perfumes, the kind I wanted to bottle and spray around my everyday.

However, the comfort between us lasted only a second before she violently jerked away from me, her arms unlatching themselves nearly as quickly as they had locked around me. The two actions a bipolar pair, one full of desperation for something familiar in this strange place, the second an act of disgust.

I didn't need to look into her mind to read the sharp look that overtook her beautiful round face. Her eyes had grown several shades darker in a matter of seconds.

Unintentionally, my tongue found the lingering residue of the young girl waiting on my lip. One last taste.

 _Slap!_

I barely felt the sting of her hand, but the action was enough.

 _Why do you have to be like this?_ The emotion in her voice was thickly strained in her mind.

The warmth of her affection chilled suddenly, my bones freezing over.

"Like what Esme?" I challenged, eyebrows raised.

 _They're good people Edward!_ She was practically begging now.

"Answer my question." The growl that rumbled up my chest snuck out between the words I spoke between clenched teeth.

I need to hear her say it. Finally.

Her chin quivered as she tried to hold in the dry sobs that would no doubtingly fall from her tongue the moment she opened her mouth.

She turned from me, her eyes not able to withstand the shining scarlet that trapped her into my gaze.

I wouldn't allow her to give up so easily. Not until she finally called me what she always knew I was.

I was back in front of her the moment her body tried to shift away from the tension quickly building around us. My hand found her trembling chin, holding it tightly between my fingers, feeling so delicate as if with a flick of my wrist I could snap this bone in two.

She flinched, her hands desperately holding on to my forearm, pulling to get away.

 _Please, Edward._

"Say it, say it, Esme," I whispered. It was the loudest noise in the room, even the rain had quieted to just a patter.

"You're a monster." She cried out softly, her eyes brimming with a poignancy that should have been tears. Her body shook with sobs.

The truth fucking hurts.

Not me, I knew what I was. But held between my fingers I watched my creation fall apart in the undeniable truth.

"I think that's quite enough Edward." His voice echoed calmly against the room of leather, paper, and written words.

The predator inside banged at his cage. The snarl that ripped from my lips was more the creature's, not the man's.

"She's mine!" I tugged Esme closer to me, my nails digging into her diamond hard skin. She gasped.

I pulled Esme's back to my chest, her small frame still shook with sobs that seemed to grow uncontrollably.

My eye flickered towards the open doors of the room, where the doctor stood.

And suddenly, my aggression faded. Like a gush of wind, it was blown away before it even had a chance to linger.

Everything faded away as my eyes took in the honey-haired man standing in the doorway, looking just the same as he did that night he was hunched over the deer in the clearing. However, today his clothes were more modern, his eyes two topaz gems and his arms did not cradle the bleeding neck of an animal, but instead a limp brunette.

Her face was hidden away, tucked protectively in the neck of the man who created her. The same man who created me. One thin arm lay like a noodle in her lap, the other dangling free. I saw her finger twitch in rapid motions as if she were holding an invisible pen, writing messages into the air.

"I see that you care very much for your child Edward," Carlisle spoke; his eyes had never left mine while I had been busy examining the being in his arms.

This girl, whose mind was quiet to me, left me transfixed. Despite the movement of her hand, I would think she was dead in her limp and thoughtless state.

"I also care very much for my children." Our eyes met. His gaze was strong and calm yet intensely serious as if what he was saying was life-altering.

 _All of them._ His mind called to me.

My grip on Esme loosens and she slipped out of my threatening grasp, moving back amongst the bookshelves as if to disappear into the darkness.

"Come, please, all of you. We have much to discuss and I must put Bella to bed."

"What?" I muttered.

My mind swam in thoughts that I could not understand. The swirling emotions that once brimmed to the surface of my being now danced gracefully around in the pit of my stomach. Confusion clouded the room as I continued to stare at the petite woman who seemed to command the room even though she lay motionless.

"Everything shall be explained. Now come along."

He disappeared out of the door, taking the girl with him. Esme followed quickly after, not wanting to be left in the same room with me alone.

A deep ache quickly filled the gap that existed in my chest. Pulling me towards the door, aching to follow the others.

I clutched at the drenched fabric that sat above my still heart and followed in a daze.

* * *

A/N: I hope you enjoyed. Leave me some love as we wait in anticipation for Carlisle to give us the skinny on this whole situation.


	11. Chapter 11

"I lit a fire with the love you left behind, and it burned wild and crept up the mountainside. I followed your ashes into outer space. I can't look out the window, I can't look at this place"  
- _Stars_ , Grace Potter & The Nocturnals

 **Chapter Eleven**  
 **BPOV**

* * *

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

' _All its land is brimstone and salt, a burning waste, unsown and unproductive, and no grass grows in it, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah. Admah and Zeboilm, which the Lord overthrew in His anger in His wrath.'_

The pain radiated everywhere, from the base of my skull to the tips of my toenails and down deep into the pit of my soul. I felt God's wrath punish me with the same fire and brimstone in which all of Sodom and Gomorrah were forced to endure.

The feeling was so violently fresh. I could still feel the snow melting underneath my broken, burning body.

The tighter his arms wrapped around me the more vehemently I longed to feel comforted, full of light and warmth, like I knew it felt when my eyes were open. But they were not. I was plunged back into the darkness; drowning so soon after I had just started tasting the air again.

When the light in front of my eyes turned gloomy then nightmarishly black, the only thing I could see was the remnants of an endless night, staring up into a snowy moonless sky. When I felt his arms wrapped around me now, he wasn't twirling me around a twinkling Christmas tree on a cozy winter's night, a crackling Victrola filling our small cabin with a haunting and beautiful sound that encased us in a fleeting moment of contentment.

But now, as I lay paralyzed in the blankness of the unknown depths of my mind, it felt like I was being strangled. As if all it would take was for Carlisle to let me go and I would finally float towards the light that beckoned me.

"Isabella?"

I could hear my mother, calling me near. She's just an illuminated shadow in the night, but I can almost feel her, smell her perfume, and see her small yet matronly figure waiting to embrace me.

"Isabella!"

Please! Please let me go! Let me be with her at last.

"Isabella Marie Swan!"

My head jerked up from where I had buried it nose-deep in my Bible, which provided the perfect refuge for my hidden, tattered copy of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies pamphlet. The cover, once crisp with deep scarlet ink lettering and vibrant green illustrated trees, was now faded and marked, the results of being handed down from woman to woman. It had made its way from London to the streets of my small suburban town in Upper New York where I had picked it up from a fellow suffragette, before returning to University just a few weeks ago.

"Yes, Sir?"

I locked eyes with the wicked Mr. Sober.

Like most other men of academia, he was old, tall, pompous and entirely overconfident in his ability to know anything about the "weaker sex", let alone how to teach them anything worth value. It was whispered in hushed giggles around the dormitories that he had been politely asked to leave the hallowed halls of the 'superior' Harvard University after some scandal that involved a bout of 'inappropriate behavior'.

I had a keen suspicion he didn't care much for us poor females…and just not in the academic sense.

I could only imagine what my mother would say if she knew I had even the slightest inkling about homosexuality. I would have even laughed at the thought if the beady hazel eyes of Mr. Sober weren't scrutinizing me at this very moment.

"Would you care to share with your fellow classmates the nature of your fascination with King James, that has your attention otherwise occupied from the current curriculum, Ms. Swan?"

"Why the great words of our Lord and Savior, Sir," I replied. My voice barely masked in sickly sweet innocence.

"Please," he gestured to my leather-bound book, "enrich us."

Without so much as a blink or glance down at the Old Testament in front of me, I began to recite.

"All its land is brimstone and salt, a burning waste, unsown and unproductive, and no grass grows in it, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah. Admah and Zeboilm, which the Lord overthrew in His anger in His wrath."

I allowed a moment of silence to let my memorization prowess sink into his thin pale skin.

"Deuteronomy, chapter twenty-nine, verse twenty-three through twenty-five."

Our eyes battled against each other, our gazes fighting for dominance. I was pushing my luck; I knew it by the way his left eye began to twitch behind the thick smudged glass of his black-wired rimmed spectacles. This kind of poor behavior was not what made a 'Vassar Girl'. It's the kind of thing that got you a one-way train ticket home.

"That's correct Ms. Swan. I see you are a dutiful Catholic. Though lacking, the religious organization as a whole, at least it's teaching the importance of scripture."

A few hushed giggles chimed around the room at Mr. Sober's jab at my religious upbringing. I would have felt slighted if it was something I hadn't heard before. I was vastly outnumbered in my Catholicism by the overwhelming Protestants that formed this college.

As he turned on the toe of his outdated brown loafers I couldn't help myself from getting the last word in, just in an act of spite. One small step of defiance while others sacrificed their lives to dig their selves out from under the thumbs of men like Mr. Sober.

"Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ," It wasn't sarcastic in tone, but the nature of such a retort had my misogynist Professor giving one final twitch of his blotchy and slightly hunched-over body, before storming to the front of the lecture hall.

"Deuteronomy, Chapter twenty-nine, now! Quickly ladies."

 _Yes, the Lord won't wait for such delicate fingers, my girls._

I picked up my pen and resumed my thorough inspection of the pamphlet hidden away between the pages of Deuteronomy. I began to jot down the highlight of Mrs. Pankhurst's article in my own battered notebook, the workings of a girl longing to fight to be an equal woman.

- ** _IISEID-_**

"What kind of creature are you hiding up there?" Edward was the first to break the silence in the room, as soon as Carlisle returned, arms now empty of the limp form he previously held so close to his chest.

Carlisle took a seat across from where Edward was poised rigidly on the couch in the living room. Another 'homey' space that was just as disconcerting as the rest of the house. He was uncomfortable with the very nature of what the room stood for—a space meant for living memories, the heart of a human home.

Something he would never grasp.

On the opposite side of the plush couch, Esme sat as far away from her sire as physically possible. Her eyes bounced around the room, shyly taking in the very charm that Edward looked to dispel from his forethought.

She rubbed her wrists absentmindedly, still feeling the phantom pressure of Edward's harsh grasp.

"Rosalie will you sit?" Carlisle ignored Edward's inquiry in favor of a gentle request to the blonde who stood pressed against the window, staring out into the night, her mind miles away.

She remained quiet and the doctor heaved a large sigh, his creations having thoroughly exhausted the immortal man today.

"I think Isabella is to be addressed in the back half of the conversation that needs to be had, Edward."

"Fine," he answered shortly, "then start with how you passed me over to a soulless monster like Aro and can still live with that memory every day without throwing yourself into a fire."

His words were icy and yet a twinge of need lingered deep down in the pit of his words, the hurt and desperation of an abandoned child shining through his seething hatred.

Carlisle had long wondered if this day would ever come, meeting his first disastrous creation. However, he never thought that in his never-ending life he would see such an event come to a precipice in this very living room.

"Ha! I'm glad you think so highly of me…'sire'. "

An audible gasp shocked both of the men out of their intense eye contact.

Esme's head shifted back and forth between the two, processing the weight of Edward's words.

"What?" While Esme continued to stare wide-eyed, Rosalie was the first to verbalize the confusion of both women, sitting on the edges of a room-filling quickly with clashing testosterone.

Carlisle shifted his gaze from the lovely caramel haired woman whose head continued to slowly move back and forth between Edward and himself as if she was watching a friendly game of tennis between the two rather than an unspoken yet fiery brawl between immortals.

His eyes landed on the beautiful and distressed Rosalie who stood tall and defensive, arms clutched tightly across her chest, a quick raising flame burning in her golden eyes.

"I-I haven't been honest with you or Isabella. I'm afraid there's much of my past that even to this day I have felt the need to hide away from you." As a man of eloquence and scripture, Carlisle was never known to stumble over his words. Rosalie's gaze was intense upon her maker's face. He could barely meet her eyes as he continued, nails digging painfully into the palms of his hands. "Rosalie-I-I…many years before I turned Bella, I made a devastating mistake while I was in a weak frame of mind. I took something that did not belong to me"

"What Carlisle?" She spat out, venom flinging from her mouth and coating her throat as a wave of disgust began to fill her stomach that still sloshed heavily full with her afternoon hunt.

"I took Edward's life."

A low but menacing rumble emanated from the couch where Edward sat, sinking his fingers into the soft fabric of the couch. The seams of the fabric began to give way underneath his grip.

"The only unfortunate think about it was that he couldn't do me the courtesy of actually finishing the job." Edward snapped at the doctor, his sharp teeth making an audible ' _snap_ '.

"You made him?" The small mousey voice of Esme barely made it across the room to the man who couldn't help, even in such a distressing moment, but be mesmerized by her wide-set topaz eyes and the gentle curve of her face. "Not…not Aro?"

"Yes," he could barely whisper his confirmation. An overwhelming amount of shame and remorse filled him, cradling him in a blanket of horror, a making of which his past had created.

"Bullshit, Carlisle!" Rosalie jerked from the corner of the room.

"Rose-," he began. But was quickly silenced as she suddenly appeared in front of him. Her usually beautiful and ethereal face was now a mask of cold fury displayed in the furrow of her eyebrows, the scowl of her full lips and the bitterness that was already forming in her eyes, an ugly look for such an exquisite creature.

"Please tell me this is some kind of cruel joke, Carlisle?"

"It's not a joke Rosalie, I would never jest about taking a life."

The two stared at each other for a long moment.

"Is this your idea of some twisted family reunion then? Bringing the blood-sucking Volturi prodigal son home for a light round of property destruction, murder, and torment?" She was sheathing as she thought about the ruined dining room, the smell of fresh blood wafting off the man in question and foremost the comatose Bella who lay withering in the attic.

"Rosalie, please let me explain" Carlisle sighed deeply again, rising from his seat to try and embrace her, knowing how right the world could see if he held either of his girls in his arms. However, for Rosalie, the very thought of his touch at that moment made her stomach clench.

To think that she could be made of the same substance as the repulsive creature who just an hour ago tried to kill Carlisle, was nauseating. She felt violated and used. Suddenly she was reminded of what it had felt like to lay in that ally, her body left for dead after she had been taken and forced to accept the men who held her down and whispered vile words into her ear, again and again.

She moved back away from him, towards the window, her mind filled with her cruel past. A past that Carlisle and she had worked so hard to overcome. But what did it matter, she thought. They were all the same in the end, liars and users.

Her mind raced, wondering if she should wrap Bella in a blanket and take her away from this place…and these men.

"He didn't know we were coming." Edward sliced through the tension pulsing around the room. His mind an intense cloud of conflicting voices.

He had buried his head in the palms of his hands, rubbing at his temples, the two polar points between his mind that felt like they might burst open. The blonde's thoughts dominated the rest. Her inner voice was shrill and panicked filled with fright and uncertainty. The flashes of her last hour as a human were almost enough to make him balk.

Edward would tell the girl anything if it would ease her mind and in return do the same for him.

"I knew nothing about any of you. When we're commanded by Aro to go somewhere, we move, quickly and without warning."

Rosalie reluctantly turned towards the man in black, happy to see his eyes turned downward, looking like a person about to crumble into the floor in his bent uncomfortable looking posture. He was collapsing in on himself, the humanity around him more than he'd had to endure in years.

"Then how do _you_ know who _he_ is? "

"Because he's a mind reader." Esme connected the dots, the preverbal puzzle clicking together for her minutes earlier as she sat in silence observing the crazed characters in the room. "Edward didn't know anything about it…until until Carlisle told him?" She ended her statement as a question as if testing out the theory by speaking it aloud.

Rosalie stared at the woman incredulously, as if nothing she could ever say would be credible.

"In the dining room," she continued to explain, the only voice of reason in the room. "He must have already known Edward could hear inside his head, so he used it to save his life."

"It is there that I must interject Esme." Carlisle finally intruded. "I didn't hope that he would spare me if anything it would have been an eye for an eye."

"Then why?" Edward raised his head from his lap, wondering how he had ever forgotten that golden blonde hair and distinctive face, even in death.

"Because you've haunted me all these years. Although my girls may think differently, I brought them into this world to save them from tragic ends."

The doctor's eyes slid over to Rosalie for just a moment, but she couldn't look at him right now, she could only listen, still deciding if she should run from the room.

He glanced back towards Edward, the words he was about to speak already shared between them.

"I killed Edward, took his life, one that wasn't on the brink of death but one of a young man who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So in a way, I found that this was my fate. God's will to bring my first creation back to me. And if he killed me in the dining room it was only fair. It would be my sacrifice to make. But I wanted him to know." He paused, studying the being before him.

Edward pried greedily into Carlisle's head, which unlike the first time they met, just hours earlier, was now an open book. No hesitancy or walls existed between them. He swam easily through each thought and memory, collecting as many as he could to wrap his mind around the creature.

 _You always had a right to know._

"I could never begin put words to the prolific expanse of my remorse and regret. I've lived with it as if a chain on my soul, carrying it around from place to place. It's always been there, a sin for which I could never begin to beg for forgiveness."

"Then why did you never come and find me? You knew where I was. You've walked those halls of damnation, and yet here I am sitting in black, not an ounce of a soul left." Edward's words spew out like fire, abruptly standing from his seat, joining Carlisle at eye level, face to face with is maker.

 _I'm a coward, my girls might not think it, but even I have my reservations and once I handed you over to Aro I knew there was no taking it back._

"Ha!" Edward snorted, his hands tucking into the thick locks of his hair, pulling roughly at the ends in frustration. "Well look where we are now Dr. Cullen."

The men stood in a stalemate, neither having words left to compensate for the magnitude of questions still unanswered between them.

But everything came to a halt once more when a sudden piercing screech bounced through the house, startling both of the visitors who were not used to the wails of the girl in the attic.

"What is that?" Esme clutched at her chest, a very human habit she was unable to break.

"Bella," Both Rosalie and Carlisle sadly echoed in unison.

"I'll go," Rose quickly moved towards the door. Had she paused to look back at Carlisle, she would have found him standing in the middle of the room, shoulders heavy, a suddenly helpless looking face with drooping dark eyes filled to the brim with vehement emotion, but she never looked back. She escaped the room, leaving her sire to swim in his guilt.

The long and painful sounding cries of the creature upstairs remained steady for several minutes even despite Rosalie's intervention.

The vivid sounds of her calming and reassuring words floated down from the attic above them, but even her gentle soothing didn't help to relieve Isabella of her unbearable pain. It was an agony that couldn't be wrapped up in a bandage or alleviated with the help of an ice pack or a hot compress.

The remaining figures in the living room stayed quiet, standing like statues, waiting on bated breath to hear the girl's panic cease. However, it was only when Carlisle mutter, "sing Rosalie" and the sweet melody of some swaying song trickled down through the house, did finally a soothing peace fall over all of them.

Esme had watched the man with the chiseled jaw and kind eyes fall apart before her. He became more distraught with each screamed and wail. When she finally calmed his anxiety had only begun.

He started his age-old rhythm pacing around the room. A composed man suddenly turned into a tormented animal.

"Is there anything we can do Carlisle?" Esme practically begged, feeling the overwhelming need to reach out to him.

He paused at the window, taking up Rosalie's abandoned spot. His silent prayer rang through Edward's head as he begged God for mercy for the anguished girl.

"If only."

Malice was still stinging through Edward's veins as he observed Carlisle, a composed gentleman with a 1000 years of life behind him, suddenly brought to his knees by a girl who had Aro ever seen her, would be sentenced to leave the world that plagued her.

It was obvious to him that she was unpredictable. There have been mad vampires before her. They had nearly destroyed entire civilizations.

"She may not be a newborn, but it is quite obvious _Dr. Cullen_ that you're concerned letter is still relevant for your creature in the attic."

As if on cue Isabella let out another wail, which was followed closely by soft, reassuring words from Rosalie intermixed with a gentle humming.

"Your very own Mrs. Rochester…how fascinating." He mused, a wicked smirk sneaking up his face.

Carlisle pivoted on his heels, turning away from his solemn gaze out the rain-soaked window and towards his long lost _son_.

"She isn't mad Edward. She's merely…lost."

Edward snickered, his eyes rising to cast a look of interest upon the attic before landing back on Carlisle.

"I'm not sure the Volturi would see a difference if they knew what you were hiding here."

"Edward, enough." Esme chided, her tone growing harder. She'd never been a stern woman, even in this life of misery. However with each passing second, they stayed in this town, this house, even within this room she found her dead heart turning colder with every word Edward spoke.

"She isn't harmful to anyone. There would be no reason to bring the guard or Aro into it." Carlisle's voice was low and steady, yet there was no doubting the threat that lingered underneath.

"And yet here we are." An irritated Edward gestured to himself and Esme.

In a blink of a human eye, Carlisle stood face to face with the threatening man in black once again.

"Do you love Esme, Edward?"

The question took him off guard; he expected threats, a long soliloquy laced with venom and malice from the ancient vampire. Instead he seemed sad, as if even asking such a question had caused him the greatest lament.

Edward's gaze shifted over to Esme, the woman who he created with his own venom, the way Adam took his rib and created Eve. But there was no likeness between the two, he thought. She was the single piece of innocence that had ever come from his being and he wasn't sure that he could even take credit for that.

Esme looked small and broken sitting at the furthest end of the couch, taking up very little space. Edward listened as her mind waiting for her sire's response, expecting the worst after everything that had happened today.

When Edward finally answered she herself was taken aback by surprise.

"With every fiber of my being."

Her eyes met his; they're eyes seeming to gush with mutual apologies and easily bestowed forgiveness. They were all each other had, no matter where they went from here. Edward would always be cross and rough, cold-hearted to the outside world, but Esme would always be the light gleaming through his darkness.

It was their unearthly bond that made it so.

"You see what I mean when I say that I would never let any harm came to my own Esme, my Bella?"

Edward tilted his head back towards the Doctor. He didn't need to read Carlisle's mind to imagine what he would do for the two girls who clung to each other upstairs.

"We will not bring any harm to them…but we will be retrieved by the guard at some point and then it is out of my hands. You do understand that, do you not?"

With a locked jaw and a ridged nod of his head, Carlisle stepped away, collapsing back into his armchair, looking impossibly drained.

Edward waited a moment and then slid down next to Esme, a sudden need to be close caused his hand to gravitate towards hers. Their fingers tangled together easily.

"You have no idea how long you'll be with us?" Carlisle murmured, eyes shut; his head leaned back against the chair in which he sat.

"You know if you've spent any time with Aro, that we do not determine the length of a visit," Edward grunted feeling as irritated at the situation as Carlisle was apprehensive.

 _But where would we even go if we left this house?_

Esme's mind drifted in the warm air around Edward.

He had been wondering that himself.

Here he was struck with the man who damned him not only to this half-existence, but also 300 years of believing he was created by the Anti-Christ meant to live his days in a monotonous loop of murder, lust, and boredom. And yet…could any amount of time here ever be as terrible as heading back behind that cinder block prison that was Volterra?

But how could he ever squelch the rage that burned through him when Edward looked at the blonde doctor?

"Yes, well I hope that we can use this time and find some semblance of-"

"What? Friendship? Understanding? Respect for one another as creatures?" Edward spouted out fervidly the very words circling through Carlisle's his mind.

Carlisle sighed deeply.

"Very well. As I've said, I don't and won't ask for any kind of forgiveness, I can't even ask such a thing from my girls, so I won't dare ask it of you. "He paused a very raw look of vulnerability casting over his sharp, handsome features.

Abruptly, a bright look passed over his face. His eyes widening as he sat upright in his armchair, a sudden thought bubbling up from inside of him.

"Edward, can you hear Bella?"

Edward knew what he was asking. He had been thinking it since he tucked the brunette safely away in the attic.

An overpowering anticipation fell over Edward as they circled back to the mysteriously silent girl who held him befuddled.

It was time that the doctor unlocked some of Isabella's secrets.

 _ **-IISEID-**_

The pain was excruciating, just like it always was. Full of fire and brimstone, walking through the pits of hell, your skin peeling off your feet as you run through the coals, your eyes plucked from your skull by the looming vultures, even your voice and your screams are swallowed up by the poisonous air.

I've been running for days, nothing left of me but dust and bones, my body is on fire and yet I shake with an uncontrollable chill that wrecks my body with violent shakes.

But then, just when I think I'll collapse into nothing, I see it, the warm wash of sunlight illuminating this purgatory. A spark runs through me heating my cold insides. I can almost taste the sea salt in the air, almost feel their soft hands pulling me close.

Just a few more steps and I'll be there.

I step into the sun and suddenly I feel full, my eyes close in a moment of pure serenity as I let it wash over me. I fill my lungs with the fresh air that is tinged with the most heavenly aroma of lavender and spring grass.

Nothing like the summertime boardwalk I had been expecting.

My eyes flutter open presuming to see the figures I knew would be my family waiting for me. But there was no one.

I was not on a sunny ocean boardwalk, but rather in a springtime meadow abloom with purple lavender bushes and tall green grass. High hemlocks surrounded the circular clearing, allowing a soft glow of afternoon sun to peak through.

"Isabella?" Like bells, my name commanded me to turn and look upon the figure lounging in the grass just along the center of the clearing.

As I approached, the head of dark auburn colored hair filled me with a sharp pang of familiarity.

Without hesitation, I lay down beside him. Our eyes met and he smiled at me. His hand reached slowly across the space that separated us and my eyes fluttered shut just as his fingers caressed my jaw.

"Isabella."

My eye snapped open.

I wasn't in a meadow anymore and I wasn't on the boardwalk, I was back in my room. I was crouched on the floor, my dress covered in black charcoal dust, a usual scene.

However, when I followed the trail of dust back to my frenzied artistic creation, it was not the sets of eyes that I was used to seeing stare back at me, smiling in the sun on a summer's day.

It was his striking face leaning towards me, his eyes captivating and almost alive, filling me with an unknown warmth.

"Edward," I whispered.

* * *

A/N: Hope you enjoyed. As always I love to hear your thoughts! Feel free to google Mrs. Rochester if you didn't understand the reference. I feel like that character is very fitting of my Bella in many ways.


	12. Chapter 12

**"I turned and ran, to save a life I didn't have. Deer in the chase there as I flew, I forgot all the prayers of joining you. I clutched my life and wished it kept, my dearest love I'm not done yet. How many years I know I'll bare. I found something in the woods somewhere"  
** - _In The Woods Somewhere_ , Hoizer

 **Chapter Twelve:**  
 **EPOV**

* * *

"Edward."

I was deep in the woods, thousand-year-old spruces and hemlocks looming overhead when I heard my name called out.

It was barely a whisper in the wind blowing by me, rustling the branches overhead, sending leftover raindrops scattering to the forest floor.

I was jarred, turning suddenly, expecting to see a person lurking just beyond where I stood. It had been miles since I last heard the voices of the household I left behind. Neither thought nor spoken word had followed me into the depths of the northwestern peninsula forest.

And yet there it was, short and breathy as if it was spoken in surprise, a delicate voice that sent a spark riding along the curve of my spine. It ran down to my toes and out from my fingers tips, a bolt of lightening that struck without warning.

Propelled by the unnatural sensation, I ran back the way I had come, seeking out the source of the voice and the electric current that pulsed around me. Feeling like I was on the precipice of plunging off a cliff with every step I took, I moved with caution, every sense on high alert for anything…or anyone to whom the breathy whisper may have belonged.

But like any true specter, it was gone, disappeared into the air like smoke, leaving me in an uncomfortable state of longing. I was puzzled, irritated and surprisingly aroused with suspicion.

Maybe like Isabella Swan, wailing in her attic room, I too was going insane.

Although I had never been prone to hallucinations or fits of passion such as the limp girl who I had seen lay in Carlisle's arms, carried off like an invalid in an asylum, it wouldn't be altogether surprising that my mind was now beginning to turn against my rationale.

I had been out in these woods for days. I was unable to bear the pressure the walls of the Cullen home placed upon me. There were too many noises, too many voices, too much of everything. The solace of the dark twisting trees was more welcoming than the warmth of any home's hearth.

After I had told Carlisle that his creation was, in fact, the only being either mortal or immortal who had ever been impenetrable to my 'gifts', he slumped back in his armchair, looking dejected and lost, not for the first time that evening.

There was no sympathy in my cold stare to which I used to look over the weak creature that had sired me. I had no desire to provide anything to this man, let along become a savant to his darkest turmoil. I still seethed silently, even after days away; the fury of his deception rang hot within me.

"There must be something?" The desperation gathered thickly in his voice, notes of emotional exhaustion clinging as well. I recall him quickly sitting back up in his seat; his suddenly perfect posture and neat golden locks a drastic oxymoron from the anxiety that swam in the pools of his topaz irises.

I scoffed.

"Believe me when I say that I wouldn't distort the truth about something so insultingly irritating to me. You'd think to have a moment of quiet after three hundred years of hearing every thought would be a delight, but I have felt nothing but enraged by her silence."

From the moment she and that banshee came pouching out of the woods, I've wanted to crack her head open to see if there was anything inside.

"How is that possible Edward?" Esme asked, squeezing my hand that rested in hers, a comment of disproval for my tone and words floating from her mind into my own.

"I can't even begin to try and explain it." My eyes shifted back toward Carlisle. "Perhaps she's just too damaged to operate on the same level as the rest of us."

The gentle blonde, who seemed to have never been prone to hostility in his thousand years of life, sprung from his seat as if on instinct alone. However, he was not as fast as an irate Rosalie, who came sprinting into the room a moment later. Carlisle caught her in his arm, holding the girl back as she snapped her teeth at me, hissing a spray of venom into the air. The doctor's jaw was locked up tightly, holding his tongue seemed to be the only gentlemanly thing he could think to do.

His mind wandered to a more inimical place, but the only outwardly aggression he displayed was a raised chin that went ridged from the force of a clenched jaw.

 _Edward!_

Esme barked at me, her hand roughly tugging on mine from her spot still on the couch. The moment Carlisle had stood from his seat, the sure signs of an attack in his abrupt movement; I too had risen without even thinking. Ready to show him how weak he really was…all while he tried to defend a little girl's honor.

"If you ever even think about talking about Bella in that way again," Rosalie seethed out between drenched teeth, her fingers digging into the arms of Carlisle. "I'll rip you limb from limb, no matter who you are."

A challenge. Now that was something that I could stand behind. After decades of lounging in boredom that would be nothing quite as gratifying as removing this blonde's head from her shoulders, watching as her maker stared on in pathetic disbelief.

The demon inside me begged for it and a devilish smirk found its way onto my face.

The room was tense, and even the sounds of the wailing girl upstairs couldn't break us free of the surmounting enmity.

We were on the precipice of something snapping, an implosion ready to tear the house down board by board.

Esme rose slowly from the couch, her hand still planted firmly in my own grasp. She gave a sharp tug that rippled up my arm. With more than an ounce of surprise, I found myself behind dragged behind her small frame, as if she could protect me from anything.

She stood sideways been us, her hand coming up to rest firmly on my chest as she looked towards the pair still wrapped together in surmounting fury. It was only when she rested her delicate fingers against the hard planes of my chest that I felt the vibrations of a low rumbling growl building underneath the surface.

 _Enough Edward._ Her thoughts were sharp and unforgiving, but a soft and pleading ' _please_ ' quickly followed.

The smirk fell from my face and I concentrated on quieting the monster brewing inside me, only for her sake.

"I'm so sorry, Carlisle, Rosalie." Her sincerity was wasted on these poor excuse for immortals, "Edward and I are going to give you some space. I think we all need to step back and evaluate what's been discussed."

A sharp and painful cry shattered the silence in the house as Isabella began to wail once again.

All our eyes traveled upwards, following the excruciating sounds.

"And it sounds like Bella could use some your attention rather than wasting it on Edward."

I would have scoffed at her words, but my attention had drifted back towards the crying girl upstairs. I poked around in the breadth of consciousness's that floated around the house, and still…nothing.

Esme pivoted on her heel and pulled us slowly towards the doors of the living room. I watched as Rosalie shook in Carlisle's arms, like a rabid animal watching her prey get away.

"We'll just give everyone some space." She repeated, her voice calm and soothing, using the same tone she spoke to me with each time I returned from the throne room, vibrating with Aro's negative energy.

"Come, Edward." She pulled me out the door and into the foyer, her grip the strongest I'd ever felt from her.

Once out of the front door, swallowed back into the darkness of the damp night air, I easily broke her hold on me and sprinted into the awaiting forest.

Esme followed closely behind.

There was something about being free from the confines of that house that had me pushing my limbs harder, wanting to move as fast as possible, put as much distance between myself and the insanity of Forks, Washington as I could manage.

The further I ran, however, I began to notice the return of the strange ache deep inside me. The skin of my chest felt tight, pulling every fiber taunt. The tissue around my heart pinched and pulled, a feeling that I could only describe as otherworldly. These types of feelings weren't supposed to exist for immortals.

There was no pain like this for the dead.

There was only the ecstasy of feeding, the excruciating agony of being ripped apart and burned alive and the mundane boredom that filled the time between the two.

And yet, I ached. My still, dead heart hurt.

I stopped abruptly.

It took Esme a few seconds to catch up with me and by then I was anxiously pacing the forest floor, hands tangled deep into the roots of my wild hair. Frustration emanated from my every pore.

"Edward? What's wrong?" Esme finally appeared. Her concern tainting the air the instant she saw me roaming back and forth, treading a path into the soggy earth beneath my feet, a madman on the verge of a breakdown.

"We need to get out of this place Esme. I don't think I can stand it for another minute."

Somewhere in the distance, a wolf let out its piercing howl, calling to the moonless sky above us.

"Where would we go, Edward?"

"Anywhere!" I snapped, stopping my pacing to turn and growl at her.

She didn't shrink back like before. Outside, when it was just she and I, she wasn't a timid kitten. She was a woman filled with wrath.

"Enough Edward!" I was beginning to lose count of the numbers of the times she had said that very thing to me today. "You want to be a monster? Fine, then you can play your part and spend your time out here with the rest of your kind."

She turned ready to take off into the dark forest, her hands tucked securely under her arms, her spine ridged with uncertainty and a vehement sadness. Like I said before, I didn't need her mind to tell me what she was feeling. I felt it myself in the string that connected us, my rib to hers.

I ran to her side, grabbing her arm before she could leave me.

"Where are you going?"

Suddenly 'he' appeared in her mind. His smiling face seemed to glow like an angel surround by his halo.

When she turned to face me that same sadness reflected in a glassy film covering her eyes, but her face was set in determination.

"So this is your choice? You're leaving me to be with a creature that lied, killed and denied who he is?"

She reached up to caress my face, her palm lingering for just a moment as I leaned in to revel in the feeling…the closeness.

"I'm not going anywhere, Edward." She tried to reassure me with her gentle voice that wrapped around me like a warm breeze, but suddenly her fingers fell from my face and she pulled away from my grasp. "But you need some time to fight with your demons."

She paused.

"We both know we can't leave, and…"

She hesitated again.

"What Esme?"

Her eyes fell to the damp ground that surrounded us in a cocoon of cool moist air filled with the smells of moss, bark and late summer rain.

"And I like it here…I like these people. I'd like to spend some time to get to know them and their way of life. I'd like to know more about why they are the way they are. But I can't do that with you threatening and insulting them."

My eyes grew darker as she spoke. Her fascination for these mundane creatures was irrational and pointless. The closer she got to them, the harder it was going to be when we had to leave. I didn't want to see her hurt…again.

"You know we'll be leaving eventually Esme. Why bother getting attached?" I spoke coldly.

"Because that's what people do Edward. Unlike you, I refuse to believe that just because my heart doesn't beat that I don't have one at all." Her passionate voice echoed around us, her eyes suddenly filling with fire, pushing the sadness to the side.

But I had nothing to say to that. So she continued.

"I know you feel the same way. You have your own fascinations, Edward, and if you took one moment to get past this 'tortured soul' persona you've boxed yourself into, you'd see it."

She pushed the image of Isabella into my head. The brief conversation she had with Rosalie while I was gorging on a warm body by the cliff. My mind sparked with a dozen questions about the insane girl in the attic. Linger over the words shared between Esme and the girl who made my skin crawl in irritation.

"So you can brood out here for as long as you want, but when you've decided you've had enough, please come back. Maybe Carlisle isn't as bad as you think. Maybe, like the rest of us, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

With that, she turned and vanished into the trees the way we came from just a moment before.

You're wrong, I thought, you can't pretend to be a tortured soul when you never had on my dear Esme.

 **~IISAEID~**

I wandered for miles, the days passing without me even knowing. It had been decades since I'd experienced the elements of nature. Not by force, but rather lack of necessity. There was nothing that trees or rain or the sound of chirping birds could provide the coven or me. All I needed was already served on a silver platter inside the walls of Volterra.

My eyes never seemed to adjust to all the colors and movement around me as the sky lightened into the morning. I stared at the clear drops of dew that clung to the blades of vibrant green grass beneath my feet. I sat upon a rock and breathed in the humidity as it rose into the afternoon air and observed the thousand-year-old trees around me begin to sway when evening brought along a gentle breeze.

And it was quiet.

I felt a strange sense of tranquility. My body sunk slowly into its posture. Coming to a deep comfort, an all-together wraithlike feeling I'm not sure I had ever experienced.

I didn't think about Aro's betrayal, Esme's heartbreaking abandonment or even Carlisle's deception. I was still becoming just another adornment of the forest floor.

Night came and morning followed.

Finally, I rose, leisurely going deeper and deeper…lost in a sea of green. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I began to recall the fascinating shade of hunter green my mother held in her eyes.

I hadn't thought about the human who birthed me in centuries. It was something that a demon like myself doesn't hold present in their mind. But there she was…again, for the second time in as many days.

"Edward."

I turned around abruptly, almost thinking I'd find her there, draped in her striking red dinner gown, her alluring French accent whipping through the air.

But there was no one.

I ran back, closer to the house, yet far enough away that I couldn't hear any voices in my head.

I could still hear my name echoing through the trees, the branches mocking me with the soft startling voice.

A shiver ran down my spine and for a second I thought my knees might give out altogether. The pit inside my chest began its incessant ache once again. Only this time the pain was tenfold.

I stumbled forward, confused and overwhelmed with the unnatural waves of feelings that pounded against my chest, through my head, and behind my eyes.

I began to run back towards the direction of the house, my legs not able to take me as fast as I needed them to go. My mind understood nothing that my body needed at that moment and yet as I finally started to hear the rumblings of thoughts fill my mind again, the ache began to lessen.

But still, it persisted, a pestering fly continuing to lurk.

I clenched at the skin covering the dead muscle that flared up like a fire doused with gasoline inside my chest. My fingernails nearly tearing through the fabric of my dress shirt in the process. My teeth clenched, my fist balled at my side a low and menacing growl began to shake my entire body.

In what felt like an instant, I was at the edge of the clearing in which the house sat. The voices of all the occupants dull and far away, lingering somewhere in the woods opposite from where I stood now, hunched over, leaning heavily against the trunk of a tree to keep me upright.

The house was quiet.

And suddenly I was standing in the same foyer from where I once fled; this time toppled over on all fours looking like a wild creature starved for something he didn't know.

And in an instant, the raging roar of emotions and pain was gone.

My ears tingled, the pounding that deafened me every step of the journey from deep in the forest to the floor of the foyer, finally clearing. In it's a place a quiet melody rang out. It took me a moment to realize it wasn't in my head but rather running through the rooms of the house, down the stairs and into the foyer.

Piano notes twirled around the banister, the crackle of a gramophone popped against the floorboards, and the hauntingly slow lyrics pranced down the stairs, one word at a time.

' _I'll be seeing you, In all the old familiar places, That this heart of mine embraces, All day and through'_

It was like being lost inside a dream, not sure where reality begins and fantasy ends.

The slow melody was both beautiful and sinister, a chillingly good combination that sent a shiver down my body. My eyes slide shut on their own accord allowing me to just…feel.

"Are you okay?" Her delicate yet full voice pushed everything away.

All the magic slid to a halt.

I forgot where I was, who I was and what I had just endured. My mind was silent, except for her voice, those three words on repeat in my head trying to make sense of what they meant.

I didn't need to see her to know who had spoken. The quiet of her mind was enough to give her away, especially lingering in an empty house. But when I did finally open my eyes she was not what I had been expecting.

No longer was the waif of a girl lying limply in the arms of another. Instead, she stood taller than I'd remembered on the landing of the staircase. Wrapped only in a long cotton robe, she looked more modern despite her long hair hanging loose and damp around her shoulders.

I could smell her before I even took a breath. It was a euphoric scent that seemed to fill me. My senses, all five of them, were drastically overwhelmed by the strange girl before me.

"What?" I finally answered, unaware if it was the correct response but the only thing that came to mind as I gazed up at her.

When my eyes finally met hers they appeared dark and irritated. There was hardness to her stance and the way she looked at me like a queen does her subjects, high up on her pedestal, benevolent yet full of power.

"I asked if you were okay." Her eyebrows furrowed together in annoyance. "It's customary to give a response that denotes how one is feeling."

I blinked.

Was it possible she was mocking me?

"Are you jesting with me?" I blurted out, my own irritation rising, the subdued anger from earlier reemerging.

A small, wicked smirk pulled upon one side of her mouth.

"How can I not when you storm in like a raging animal crouching in my foyer? Not very gentlemanly of a Volturi guard."

It was only then that I realized I was indeed still on all fours, my body low to the floor, ready to pounce.

 _Yes, pounce on her. Take her. Show her what a true Volturi gentleman would do to a thing like her._

A growl slipped from my lips without warming, but she did not budge. Merely raising an eyebrow as if to challenge me.

That look did something strange to my body.

"Edward?" Esme suddenly emerged from down the hallway, bringing with her the smell of the woods; her eyes glistening with a fresh glint of topaz. A concerned looking Carlisle followed quickly behind her, a pair of golden irises to match Esme's.

"Everything okay Bella?" He asked her, taking in my defensive posture and the intense stare that the girl had yet to relinquish from my face.

The spot where her eyes lingered seemed to burn just the way the space behind my chest had as I sprinted through the woods.

"Edward, get up," Esme chided me.

I quickly rose, straightening the suit that still clung to my body after drying into a crunchy pile of fabric, bunching against my skin.

"Bella?" Carlisle said her name slowly, glancing back and forth between her and her barely clothed body and me with my wide dark eyes staring up at her as an addict stares at his drug of choice.

That was his exact thought, as he perceived the scene before him.

She finally turned to face him and smiled, but it didn't touch her eyes.

"I was just wondering if we should find Edward something more comfortable to wear."

The fire inside me sparked to life again, but instead of the pounding ache that raged moments before, now a slow burning ember warmed its way across my entire body.

It was the first time I had ever heard her say my name.

 _Say it again._

I wasn't sure if it was the demon inside me that wanted it or my own subconscious.

Both Esme and Carlisle shifted their gaze to me. They shared a mix of surprise, confusion, and overall concern. I would have laughed at their synchronicity if I weren't caught in her dark gaze again.

"Yes," Carlisle responded slowly, rubbing the smooth skin of his jaw. "Well, I am quite tired of Rosalie referring to him as the man in black."

Esme giggled and they shared a look not lost upon both myself as well as Bella, who had finally broken our stare to pass a suspicious look upon the two.

If only she knew the true magnitude of the thoughts that lingered beyond their matching eyes.

"I'll grab him something from your closet then."

She turned suddenly, making her way back up the stairs; her thin fingers trailed achingly slow along the dark wooden banisters, replacing the music notes that once lingered there with fingerprint stains.

"Aren't you coming, Edward?" She called after me, never looking back.

Hearing my name come off of her lips for the second time ignited the embers into a blazing catalyst. My body clenched.

I turned my gaze back to Esme and Carlisle who stood watching me intently.

"You are a guest in my home Edward, please feel free to go as you like." Carlisle eyed me wearily as he said it, a silent protective threat very much evident underneath his welcoming words.

It was evident that he hadn't forgotten our most recent standoff in the living room. The scene played out in his head.

 _Behave._

Esme's voice came to me as I wound the same path up the stairs following the warm impressions of Isabella's feet, left behind from what I could only assume was warm, almost human temperature flesh.

I wondered how long one would have to soak in scalding water to achieve that type of living bliss.

A violent flash of what curves of warm skin might linger underneath the cotton covering her stabbed at me.

I had never once in three hundred years wondered such a thing. When you live amongst nothing but beauty, you begin to see how hideous it truly is.

Her scent was enough that I could have tracked her for miles. Its current heated potency led me through the halls easily to find her.

"In here," she still called to me, from her place deep inside the large closet which I assumed housed all of Carlisle's wardrobe based on the number of suits, white doctor's coats and the overpowering male scent that lingered in the space.

She walked up and down the rows of clothing hanging neatly from racks and shelves on both sides of her. She ran her fingers over each piece before plucking one lucky garment from its home.

She was suddenly just a few inches from my face, holding up a button down shirt to compare sizing next to my tall frame.

With her closeness came breaths full of the deep, rich and intoxicating smell that practically dripped off of her. Honeysuckle, tart raspberries and a hint of something altogether feminine and unique drowned me. The heat of her skin radiated off of her and soaked into the stone that made my body impenetrable, softening it with each passing second.

Looking down at her, I watched her stare intently at the piece of clothing next to my chest. I could see every line of her face, the dark bags under her eyes weighing heavy with hunger, the sadness that lived deep in her every pore and the light that still radiated from her dead soul hidden underneath it all.

A low and sultry growl escaped from my lips.

Her eyes rose to meet mine. In the briefest of moments, there was nothing but the quiet girl and me. Recognition of something deep and primal surged between us.

It was exhilarating and absolutely terrifying.

I was desperate to find anything lurking between the temples of her mind. But there was still nothing.

Just as quickly as the moment pulled us in, she shattered it back into place, her eyes returning to examine the garment.

"It might be a little snug around the arms, but it should do."

Her voice was dull and emotionless.

I raged in the unknown surrounding her…Isabella.

"Don't you think you should pick a different color?" I muttered as she handed me a pair of black jeans to go along with the button down of the same shade.

She smiled up at me both innocent as an angel and as wicked as the devil himself, although, it never touched her dark, expressionless eyes.

I ached.

"No…" She ran her index finger as light as a feather down the lapel of my jacket, barely even touching me. But I could still feel the heat radiating off her body as if I'd been severely burned.

She looked up at me.

"But black is definitely your color."

She left me standing alone in the closet, a pile of clothes in my hands, my body aching like it never had before.

I wanted her in ways I didn't even know.

* * *

A/N:

I've received some of the most lovely comments since I posted the last chapter. As always thank you for the support. I am anxiously anticipating the next couple of chapters as Bella and Edward finally get their time to interact! Stay tuned, and as always send me your love.

 **Song referenced in this chapter:** _"I'll Be Seeing You"_ , Billie Holiday


	13. Chapter 13

**"Don't be cautious, don't be kind. You committed, I'm your crime. Push my button anytime. You got your finger on the trigger, but your trigger finger's mine."  
** - _COPYCAT_ , Billie Eilish

 **Chapter Thirteen:**  
 **BPOV**

* * *

Brother.

It was the second time I attempted the word.

This time it was only in my head, but it felt like I had shouted it from top of a mountain, hearing it echo around me as I sauntered out of Carlisle's closet. A chill encased my bare skin, leaving me hypersensitive to the sensation of my hard flesh brushing against the thin cotton fabric that clung around my nakedness underneath. A strange ecstasy built as the chill raged through my body.

Walking away from the darkness that so vividly draped itself over the suit clad creature behind me, I felt as if the moment had been narrated like a fable. Each step I took slowed into heavy footsteps of purpose, each breath I inhaled came with its own sharp gasping noise. I felt akin to David as he slayed goliath with his sling and yet a stark comparison to the beautiful Persephone being dragged to hell by Hades felt more fitting.

I shook my head back and forth, trying to remove the mystifying cloud that fogged my mind, turning my thoughts to romanticized jargon.

But my body refused to listen and continued to experience crashing waves of emotion that I'd never felt before. The venom inside me rushed in a rapid river from my head to my toes and back again. It pulled in my mouth and darkened my eyes to a shade of black that screamed of hunger.

 _Brother._

Just hours before I had found my eyes fluttering open to see his face staring up at me. Fabricated by charcoal, immortal illusions and flashes of vivid memories, he glared at me from his eternal spot on my canvas, a fitting image of brooding male energy, so spot on to the man I just left standing in a closet that it scared me.

"Edward".

I had let the feeling of his name saturate my taste buds, vibrate through my throat and ring inside my ears. It suffocated on it.

The clarity of reality spun around me in circles, dizzying my mind so vehemently that I had to slam my palms to the floor in order to right my head.

"Bella?"

Rosalie's concern was thick in her voice, tainting it in a way that made my very empty stomach sour. If I could retch I think I would have.

Evan without the time to think about the repercussions of her seeing my creation, I knew in an instant I must hide what I had done.

A secret. Sisters aren't supposed to have secrets.

I slid the canvas underneath one of the drop clothes that laid underneath my easel and in its place pulled an old canvas into its spot, a different piece from a post crazy Bella.

Rosalie arrived to find me practically lying on top of the canvas, stroking the charcoal smudges that formed my mother's face.

I didn't have to put this show on as an act. The minute I looked at my crazed creation, I went limp. It wasn't often, if ever, that I pulled these works from their hidden pile in the corner. Rosalie would pull me from the floor, deposit me into the bath the discreetly disposed of the staring eyes lying on the floor before I returned to the room.

I never asked to see them again. I noticed them pile up, hidden under drop cloths for a time before a stack would suddenly vanish once it reached the height of the windowsill. I placed that observation far from my mind. It didn't matter. The thought of staring down at their fictitious faces while in a moment of sanity seemed like reliving an eternal heartbreak I'd rather forget.

And forget I had. Everything. Everyone.

Now looking deeply into my mother's eyes, studying the depth of her irises, a longing stirred inside of me.

And indeed I was heartbroken all over again.

I let out one wrenching sob, before completely collapsing over.

Rosalie swooped in and shushed me, laying me down into a steaming bathtub, pressing her soft finger tips into my forehead, attempting to smooth out the deep creases that existed there.

The water clouded around me as the charcoal fell from my skin.

I quieted and found some pseudo tranquility as she hummed a beautiful melody that I couldn't quiet place.

"What is that?"

She smiled down at me.

"Billie Holiday".

"I'll Be Seeing You," she nodded her head as she reached down past my feet to begin draining the tub of its now cold, dirty water.

"I don't know how I forgot that one."

Rosalie laughed. It was the sound of angels.

"Well, I have noticed she's fallen to the bottom of your stack as of late."

I hunched lower and lower in the porcelain tub as the water disappeared around me.

"I blame Carlisle, he's been commandeering my collection with 60s Broadway lately."

We both laughed this time and like it always does, normality began to rush back over me, like the scalding new water that filled the bath.

"Speaking of Carlisle," I furrowed my brown, "where is he? I don't hear him."

Rosalie's smile quickly faded, she turned her attention to testing the water falling from the facet, as if somehow any temperature would burn me.

"Oh, he's around somewhere." She paused, "Hunting I believe actually." She said it as if it had just slipped her impeccable memory.

All of a sudden I didn't feel bad about my secret drawing tucked away in my room.

"Rosalie," I warned.

Her eyes slid back to mine reluctantly.

"He's with that woman."

As if some how it had slipped _my_ mind, the events of the last few days sprung back to me in vivid color and clarity.

Edward.

His name propped inside my head without warning or reason and suddenly I wanted to say it out loud…again.

I sat up abruptly in the tub, sending haphazard splashes of water out and onto a disinclined looking Rosalie and the floor.

"Hey!" She screeched, standing to brush the beads of water quickly from her high waisted cotton shorts before they began to soak into the undoubtedly expensive fabric.

"Tell me everything Rose," I demanded.

"Like what?" She shot back. She was irritated and growing more volatile by the second, not very typical for my sister. She began to pace the small room, avoiding my scorching gaze. Her arms defensively crossed over her chest.

The last thing I could recall of "that woman" revolved heavily around the enigmatic and brutal man in black she traveled with, and the garish scene of Carlisle being nearly decapitated by the strange specimen.

"What's happened since I've been…" I struggled to find the words to describe my comatose state, "away?"

"Nothing." She responded shortly.

"Bullshit Rosalie!"

"Bella!"

We stared intently at one another, our eyes looked in a battle for knowledge and silence. Her outburst not one of shock at my uncharacteristically vulgar choice of explicit, but rather in deep-seated desperation for me to stop my inquiry and remain ignorant of the situation.

Rosalie took it upon herself to be not only a nurturing and supportive pseudo sister during both my times of extreme vulnerability but also in the lucid moments as well. But with every passing decade as I begin to slip further and further from her grasp her nurturing had become an unspoken maternal instinct. She longed for motherhood in life and without meaning to, I feel many times as if she sees me as her child in this deathly existence.

I would always love her. But her nature towards me was involuntarily degrading. It drew something deep and melancholy to my surface.

My gaze suddenly softened, and my face fell as that very mixture of vast sadness and depression bubbled to the surface.

Here we were again, small defenseless Bella wrapped around herself, bare in a bathtub straight off another mental break.

"Fine." Her voice finally broke the weighing silence between us. Her face fell in defeat and she took her seat back beside the tub. "But know what I'm about to tell you may change…everything." Rosalie was always prone to the occasional womanly dramatics, which I often attributed to the era in which she was born and bred. However, this time the seriousness that tainted her beautiful face quickly disintegrated any notion of humor from my mind.

"Everything about what?"

She looked down at her hands that were tangling themselves together in an intricate web of flesh and nails, a simple diamond ring wrapped around her middle finger on the right-hand …a forever reminder of how she ended up in this life.

"About Carlisle."

She proceeded to tell me everything.

Thoughts I had always held close in my mind and deep within my soul about whom my Sire was, began to shift. However, not in the way that Rose's opinion had. Her mind was a slew of tectonic plates mating violently, crashing into one another creating earthquakes and volcanoes that erupted inside setting her eyes ablaze.

Mine was more of a nudge, a ceramic teacup chipped on one side in an otherwise perfect set. The hand-painted flowers were still immaculate, the craftsmanship commendable, and the stability of the piece still the rarest and most desirable of all the cups. A small chip lingered but could be overlooked quickly when one took in the beauty of the whole set.

What jarred me more vehemently was not Carlisle's one indiscretion or even his deception toward his family, but rather that someone like…Edward…could come from the same immortal elixir that ran though my veins.

How could someone so dark and angry be made of the same matter as beautiful Rosalie, impeccable Carlisle and small weak Isabella?

To think that what coursed through me also was moving through him triggered a warm wave of something through my body. I was quickly reminded of the tantalizing and the once indescribably familiar scent that wafted off of him in gusts when he entered our foyer.

It suddenly made sense.

"I think I want to be along for a while Rose. I need to think."

She had been pacing back and forth for some time now and she finally turned to take me in, searching for any sign that I was ready to abandon ship.

"We can leave Bella."

I stared at her incredulously.

"What?"

"She approached the tub, quickly falling to her knees and gathering my warm, wet hands into her own.

"We don't have to be apart of this anymore. We can go and live our own lives. I'll take care of you, and we can finally go somewhere you've always wanted to, Paris maybe! Or Tuscany!"

Her words were light with excitement that didn't reach her eyes. We both knew we'd never leave Carlisle. She just needed someone to admit it. She had a hard time letting men into her life, and Carlisle was no exception.

This was a blow to her trust.

I rubbed my thumb over the diamond ring prominently displayed on her delicate looking finger.

"You know I'd never leave him, Rose…" I paused, " and I think you know that despite all of this, he's still ours. You need him as much as I do."

Our eyes met and I once again saw the sadness that had lingered deep within Rosalie since the day she opened her eyes no longer part of the human world. She could blaze brightly with passion or humor or anger so vehement that you think it could never be extinguished, and yet it was that despair that would always be apart of her, trumping everything else.

"Okay," she pulled her hands from mine. "Do you want me to refill the water?" She asked in a voice that was small and distant.

I shook my head, wishing to stand and wrap her up in my arms like she had done for me so many times before.

She stood and made her way to the door, pausing to turn and look at me once more with her splintered eyes so black I thought they might swallow me whole.

But she didn't say anything. She left without a word, fleeing from the truth and her feelings, into the woods to drown it all in blood.

I remained in the tub steaming with fresh water poured by myself, and a head filled with the new knowledge I had about Carlisle… and Edward.

I dipped my head under the water, letting it warm my dead skin until only the tip of my nose was left exposed to the air.

Opening my mouth, allowing the liquid to drown me, I muttered the word I'd wanted to say since Rosalie informed me about the man in black's true origin.

"Brother."

Muddled down by the weight of the water and caught in bubbles filled with trapped air, it still managed to sting my ears. It wasn't the connotation of the word, but rather the horribly wrong feeling that shuttered through the length of my submerged body that turned me off from it.

I had two brothers in life and another in death, but associating them within the same familiar realm as Edward twisted my empty stomach into an uncomfortable knot.

I suddenly began to feel suffocated by the water in which I usually found my solace. The water that created a cocoon of damp warm air that clung in the small bathroom, fogging the mirrors and pressing my broken soul together, keeping it from shattering and falling down the drain.

Propelling myself out of the water, I gasped for oxygen that, although unnecessary for my survival, seemed like it was lifesaving after drowning in the liquid that surrounded in the tub. It felt more like sludge now.

I gripped the porcelain sides of the bath so tightly that creaking sounds of protest began to scream from the pressure. I took rapid, shallow breaths, unable to get enough of the air into my lungs. If my heart still beat it would have pounded out of my chest.

As the minutes passed so did the abrupt panic that had ceased me, but suddenly I felt the comfort of my ritualistic bathing asphyxiating. The only noise in the room was that of the water slowly splashing up against my skin.

It was all too much.

Seconds later I had escaped the room, leaving the thoughts of brothers to wash down the drain with my bathwater. I needed a distraction from the excessive thoughts that ran rampant through my mind, circling in a maddening loop.

Throwing on a nearby bathrobe, I began to dig on my hands and knees through the piles of records that were stacked along one corner of the attic.

Everything from Elvis, to Jo Stafford, Mozart, Duke Ellington, Dean Martin and a slew of others adorned my bedroom floors, a collection acquired over decades. Jasper once told me that if all else failed us financially we could "hock the vinyl for a small fortune".

Even with all the options before me, I found myself reaching for one of my favorites, needing to hear more of the notes that Rosalie had hummed for me earlier.

As soon as the crackle of the needle found its way through the grooves of the vinyl and the first notes were struck, filling the room, my body sagged in relief. I lay sprawled out on the old wooden floor, my eyes shifting closed as the song began to float me up into the clouds.

The piano was magical.

The horns were melancholy.

And I waited on pins and needles for Billie's voice to flood my senses, just as hauntingly mystifying to me as she was in 1938.

All was calm in my broken mind for just a moment.

 _Crash!_

 _Bang!_

 _Thump!_

Silence.

It took less than half a second for his scent to come racing up the two flights of stairs between the foyer and the attic, slip under the crack of the closed door and smack me in the face.

I sprung up from where I lay on the floor, my body's actions suddenly not of my on volition.

As if the music was controlling my limbs, I found myself rising slowly yet with such fluid grace it felt like I might actually be floating with each piano cord that hummed through the air and around my tingling body.

' _I'll be seeing you in all the familiar places'_

I was out of the attic door.

' _That this heart of mine embraces'_

Further, I floated, down the stairs, through the halls of the second story and towards the last corner where I knew once I turned I would be able to finally see him.

' _All day though'_

My strange out of body dancing brought me to the top of the staircase, looking down into the foyer. And there he was, exactly where my humming body knew he would be.

The front door was flung open, a cooling late summer breeze blowing in, cascading over his body, which was, crouched ready to spring just beyond the entrance of the house. The wind carried his intoxicating smell right to me, and with one deep inhale my feet finally seemed to touch the ground again.

I watched intently as his gaze traveled from the floor of the foyer, slowly moving up each stair as if he was following something with his eyes before it finally landed on my face and we were left to stare at one another unashamedly.

His eyes slid closed, his mouth left just the smallest bit ajar, tasting the air. He looked as if he was in a moment of euphoria…and something deep and dark inside me hissed for me to go join his mysterious ecstasy.

"Are you okay?" I had asked him, words that meant nothing to my mind. They were spoken as if by habit, to fill the silence of the room, an autopilot reaction.

He remained still and quiet, the only sign that he was anything more than a beautiful work of stone and marble was the slight furrow of his eyebrows, shifting his features into one of concentration and then quickly shifting that of frustration. His wide dark eyes remained concealed.

Another moment ticked by and I found myself enjoying the free moment to take him all in without having his intimidating stare and glowering presence taunt me.

He was the most handsome man I had ever seen in all my years alive or dead, that was absolutely certain.

His hair was a mess, pushed and pulled in every which direction, never deciding on which way it should lay. But nonetheless, it was the most striking shade of copper and bronze, swirling together like melted caramel ice cream topped with chocolate sauce on a hot day.

He was still dressed in his suit with the shining gold pin menacingly adorning his lapel, reminding me of who he was and the pain and terror he could so easily inflict upon me. However, now the suit was wrinkled and tarnished with dried rainwater, debris from the forest floor and several rips and tears ruining its once perfect appearance.

Although more Adonis than man, he looked much younger now with his eyes closed and his jacket sleeves shrunk several inches, exposing the skin above his wrists. He looked like a boy in his first ill fitted suit, if only for that moment where he was still as a statue.

I was compelled to move forward, reach out to him and examine more of the beautiful piece of art crouched in my foyer. I wanted to feel the lines that made up his face, trace the muscles that strained against the ruined fabric of his jacket sleeves and feel out any soft spots in the otherwise immovable material that he was made of.

But all too soon his eyelids slid back and the statue was no more. Instead, a cold intriguing creature was left staring at me. Once an artist observing a piece of work, I suddenly became an amateur ethnologist.

"What?"

My creature spoke.

"I asked if you were okay." It was my turn to furrow my eyebrows together, becoming annoyed with this new talking version of the man I seemed to prefer as a silent creation that I could study at my leisure. "It's customary to give a response that denotes how one is feeling." I couldn't help the quirk that snuck into my response.

The weight of this man's significance in my life as of an hour ago was not lost upon me. I didn't know what to feel.

Should I be enraged, once again ready to growl and leap at him as I had upon first meeting? It would be a fair reaction after the harm he brought to Rosalie and most notably Carlisle. A flash of the dark cracks that marred his perfect skin came to my mind.

Maybe an anxious worry would be more appropriate. He was still a member of a coven whose only reason for doing house calls was usually to extinguish entire groups of vampires. And I am still not completely sure why Aro would send him and his woman to us. There had to be more than that century old letter that Edward slid across the table.

Terrified also seemed like a dignified emotion for all the new and overwhelming feelings and emotions that have raged through my body since his arrival in our little clearing. I have felt more in the last few days than I have in years…and yet terror could also linger in knowing that just hours after his arrivals my mind launched an abrupt war against me, throwing me back into the abyss. And on top of it all, once I had reached the bottom of my rabbit hole, I had found that he had crawled in after me, forcing his eyes to stick to my soul and his name to be chocked out of my mouth.

And yet…I felt none of those things. Instead, an overpowering intrigue raged through my veins, blackened my eyes and set my mind buzzing over his every breath.

Just the way he looked at me now felt like a billion nerve endings had been opened up along my skin. My body remained still at the top of the stairs but I could feel a vibration cascading around me as if I was violently shaking in the spot I stood.

"Are you jesting with me?" He replied. His voice like hot honey spilling down your neck, a soft caress, and a stinging jolt.

A strange and sinful feeling smile crept along my lips. A moment of power seized me as the realization of standing above this supposedly vicious, superior creature watching a dumbfounded look lingered along his face.

"How can I not when you storm in like a raging animal crouching in my foyer? Not very gentlemanly of a Volturi guard."

He raised slowly, a growl slipped past his full lips and the vibrations of my body seemed to increase with a vengeance.

Carlisle and Esme entered soon after, slicing through the surmounting cloud of tension and heated energy that our small repartee had cumulated together to create, instead replacing it with awkward hesitancy.

I still didn't know how I was supposed to address the small woman who stood far too close to Carlisle to be simple platonic. She seemed harmless enough, but I wasn't ready to address her or my own Sire for that matter.

He may have just been a chipped cup in an otherwise perfect set, but that chip could very easily prick you if you weren't looking…and I wasn't ready to look quite yet. So I was left to leave the cup where it was, still looking perfect from a distance.

Perhaps that is how we found ourselves standing nearly nose-to-nose in Carlisle's bedroom closet.

I could still feel his sweet breath on my cheek, his scent leaving an intoxicating film along my skin, that I didn't dare reach out and taste with the tip of my tongue for fear that I may be lost forever if I did…even though I so badly wanted to do nothing more.

As I crept back up the stairs to my attic room I could hear my gramophone still spinning the record round and round, Billie's voice soulfully filling my safe space.

' _Seek and find they always say. But up to now, it's not that way'_

With each step, I felt more and more weighted down. As if I was a soldier returning home from war, beaten and battered, a small piece of myself left behind in the foreign soil, leaving me a little empty inside.

" _Maybe fate has let him pass me by, or perhaps we'll meet before I die. Hearts will open, but until then…"_

The high of the hum that rang through me dissipated quickly, leaving along with the last vestiges of my bath heated flesh. In its place, my cold, hard, dead skin remained…a forever reminder that I could try for another ten decades to convince myself that I was meant for this life and always come back to the same conclusion.

Rosalie was right, she always was...I wasn't meant to be a part of this world.

I let out a deep sigh, no longer able to revel in the otherworldly feeling that came over me today while being in the presence of the man in black.

I was tired of thinking though.

I slid the attic door shut behind me with a nudge from my barefoot. I made my way over to my large oak desk, allowing my body to fall into the armchair there like a pile of gelatin. With trembling fingers, I pulled a cigarette from the half-empty pack lying on top of a stack of books and lit it with an old golden zippo lighter.

The pungent smell of tobacco wafted up and into the air around me. I breathed in deeply.

I situated the slim stick into the crystal ashtray on the corner of the desk, allowing it to smolder.

I picked up my pen and began to write for a second time….

 _ **Dearest Jasper,**_

" _I'm left alone, all alone"_

* * *

A/N:

My dearest readers, I do apologize for the delay. The last days of 2018 and the early days of 2019 have been quite hectic with travel and family and the normal life pursuits. I do hope you forgive me for being away for so long. Let this chapter be my apology and be the beginning of a better foot forward in moving forward with the story and getting these two crazy kids into some intense shenanigans.

As always, I'll wait with bated breath to hear your thoughts!


	14. Chapter 14

**"A bunny in a bunny suit. Vampire with plastic teeth. Who in the world do I think that I am?** **I suppose that depends on who I believe."  
** - _Bunny In A Bunny Suit_ , Simone White,

 **Chapter Fourteen:**  
 **EPOV**

* * *

It was raining again.

I had never been very perceptive to the weather. It seemed to be another incredibly human things that didn't fall into the repetitive agenda of hunt, drain, and kill all Volturi coven members exist within. However, in this small northwestern part of the world, it demanded to be noticed, surrounding you in every direction. I felt like I was being drowned by greenery and rainwater.

I had been standing in the library of the Cullen home for the better part of the morning. From my spot in front of one of the floor-length windows, I watched as the sky shifted from blue to grey, only to finally settling into dismal looking charcoal.

Thunder rolled through the mountains, the light summer breeze picked up its speed and finally the rain returned in sheets that soaked everything in a matter of seconds. The gleaming sunshine of yesterday was nothing but a memory.

That's where he found me, standing in his library, looking out across his property, wearing clothes from his closet, handed to me by his perplexingly mystifying offspring.

"Edward?"

I didn't answer, still watching the weather shift outside.

 _May we talk? There are some things I feel l need to say._

"Is there?" I muttered nonchalantly. "From my point of view, everything is very much out on the table." I remained facing away from him.

"Perhaps we can reexamine what information has already been communicated then." His eloquent words sounded hopeful.

"Why?"

A stretch of silence hung in the air between us, but his mind betrayed his inner musings more readily than his spoken words.

 _I would like to get to know you._

I snorted.

"Is that the same sentiment you shared with your other creations after they woke up in this nightmare? Ravenous with a thirst they couldn't quench, feeling so confused and broken they didn't know what to do first, desperate to find a permanent silence hoping it would bring some peace before the animal inside them devour the world?"

I glance at the blond doctor over my shoulder.

"Is it Carlisle?"

 _Enough._

I shifted the whole way around, taking him in for the first time since he entered the room. He seemed to abandon his usual niceties in favor of hard-set frustration.

Even with the memory of his bloodstained mouth grinning up at me in the woods fresh in my mind, I had a hard time accepting that this man could really be the savage creature that took my life.

He was everything that Aro was not. Not only in mentality, but physical the two might as well have been worlds apart.

Carlisle Cullen was the epitome of 'light', with his golden yellow hair stuck somewhere between the glow of the sun and a pile of golden hay. His eyes were like staring into two butterscotch candies, so soft and gentle it made me want to scream. Even his body poised so beautifully, like a sculptor's masterpiece, in front of me appeared warm and inviting.

Esme and he were truly cut from the same cloth, molded from one and the same.

It befuddled and vexed me entirely.

And yet he was not putty to be molded by whatever force came along. Underneath the sweaters and manners, he was still very much made of steel and venom…just like me. A creature captured in a man's body.

He seemed relaxed in his posture, but his jaw was set, his razor-sharp teeth clenched together so tightly the muscles of his face bunched in large clumps of concrete flesh.

"Enough?" I mocked his tough tone aloud.

"Yes, enough. You obviously don't want me to treat you as a father would his son, so I won't. In fact, it would be easier than you think for me to add up all the hostility, hatred and inexplicable cruelty you have already brought into my household and realize that you are nothing more than that crest you wear so proudly."

The butterscotch eyes I had just observed as kind and gentle were now two pods of black bubbling lava, burning with emotions that seemed to always be lingering just below the surface.

Perhaps there was more to the Doctor than what met the eye.

But now he was challenging me. Throwing down his alpha status in this coven. My skin immediately started to prickle with excitement, my own fire bubbling up inside. The demon rattled at his cage.

"And what shall we do about it, Dr. Cullen?" I raised an eyebrow at the angry man. "It seems that we both would much rather ignore any soliloquies on my parentage and go our separate ways if possible."

I take a step closer, my hands clasped into fists behind my back. "Trust me when I say that I would not be here on my own accord if I had any type of free will. I may seem a prince high on his throne, but I am nothing more than a master's puppet. If you think I've brought despair and curtly into this house, you must not remember your time in court with much clarity."

I snapped in his direction, my body growing tenser as my tangent went on. The sleeves of my borrowed shirt gave small straining noises of protest against my swelling biceps.

Carlisle remained composed, his mind shifting back and forth weighing each word I said in his mind.

Finally, he spoke.

"I do have much I could say to you Edward, but I'll save it for a time when soliloquies seem more appropriate and I have calmed my state of mind back to that of a gentleman and not a creature of a short temper."

A brief flash of him lunging at me from across the room came to my mind, but as soon as it was there he pulled it away from me, sealing his thoughts once again.

I growled.

"How do you do that?" I demanded.

A small smirk found its way to his face and suddenly I thought I would be the first one to lunge.

"You've been naive to a climate of ignorant humans who think mind reading is the work of a good Hollywood film and a pack of blood saturated vampires too desensitized to care for decorum. All it takes is a little clarity and some concentration."

"Well, I don't like it!" I growled through my teeth.

He mouth formed into a small smirk. "Not everything can be handed to you, Edward…even immortality has its limits."

That left me agape.

The genuine and complex thoughts of this coven were too much to bear in a constant loop…or maybe it was just the small nagging piece of truth that I couldn't stand. That this man and those girls made up a small and warm ball inside of me that I'd rather ignore. The part that made me hold Esme a little closer every time we parted, the part that kept me from sinking my teeth into that young girl's neck, a part that made me…almost something more than inhuman.

But I didn't care to dwell on that.

"Now that we've seen that we are both unwilling participants in Aro's master plan and that we care little for the other's company at the moment, we must still tolerate our situation."

"And how do you suggest we do that?"

"We coexist Edward."

Our eyes lingered in a gaze of challenged power.

"Foremost," he began, "this is my home and my coven. While I cannot and would not force you to do anything against your will, as has already been stated, I am not Aro, there are some… elements of decorum, I may ask of Esme & yourself.."

My mouth opens almost immediately to challenge the one moral issue I will never abide by even if that meant having to reenact the near beheading incident we had in the dining room on the day of my arrival.

Before I can even begin to voice this sentiment he raised his hand up in a halting gesture.

"I won't ask you to change who you are. I know that would be fruitless, but I must ask that you travel beyond our town limits if you must feed."

His eyes turned hard for just a second.

"Your previous indiscretion has already been noted as a tragedy in the community here. It might be difficult for you to comprehend, but we try to immerse ourselves wherever possible in the places we inhabit and we don't take lightly to people getting in the way of that type of living."

I vividly recalled the ambrosia of red fluid pumping out of the young blonde's femoral artery as I pinned her to the side of her broken down car.

I felt no shame for his scolding, for my natural tendencies. I wasn't a mindless blood zombie like the rest of my coven, but I wouldn't deny myself such pleasure either. That little nagging ball of humanity, while potent in times, could easily be forgotten.

His words only elicited a wave of fresh hunger.

"Anything else Doctor?"

He took several large steps in my direction, halting when he was just inches from my face. At similar heights we stood nose to nose, our eyes locking in cool stares.

 _I am a patient and kind man Edward, but don't take that for granted. I will give you everything you ask for- hospitality, conversation, and space to do as you wish. But when it comes to my girls I can be a very cruel creature myself. Please get to know them, talk to them-especially Bella, she may surprise you with a fire that I have never seen in another of our kind._

Remembering the limp girl that lay in his arms, it was difficult for me to picture anything burning inside that girl but agony. However, comparing such a statement to the looming ethereal creature that seemed to turn me into a gelatinous pile of flesh I could readily agree to Carlisle's comments.

What an enigma that girl was.

"Edward I will welcome you with open arms…but if you bring any more pain or suffering to either of my girls, I won't be so kind."

A small smile came to my face.

"I'll abide Carlisle, if only you maintain your own warning when it comes to my girl."

The smile fell from my face the moment Esme popped into his mind.

"I could never harm Esme."

I didn't like the clouded hue that encircled each thought he had about Esme. It was far too similar to the all-encompassing haze that overtook me as I stood in the closet with the crazy girl.

"Then we have a gentlemen's agreement."

"Cheers," He muttered, our eyes never leaving each other.

"Must you talk about us as if we are not individuals made of the same matter as you men?"

Both of us snapped our heads towards the open door of the library where the very girl we were just discussing stood leaning against the frame of the door, a look of pure irritation marring her delicate facial features.

No longer was she clad in her satin bathrobe, her long locks of wet hair laying down her back. Now she was dressed in another vintage looking outfit. This one seemed more a remnant of the 1940s- a dress in slate blue with an A-line skirt that fell just above her stocking covered knees. The cinched waist and collared neckline silhouette made her look small and young.

"Bella, Love?" Carlisle backed away from me, taking a step towards the vintage visage.

"How many times must I remind you, men, that we may look pretty as a rose on the outside, but that doesn't mean we need to be treated like a delicate flower. "

She huffed and abandoned her spot in the doorway to approach the desk that sat in front of one of the large windows.

"Hmm, yes I apologize, my dear." He said it so casually as if he were asking her about the weather and still managed to sound completely sincere. "Speaking of roses, have you seen ours anywhere?"

His voice was calm and level, but his mind was growing a little frantic with bursts of concern and inquiry he was longing to ask 'his girl'.

 _Does she know?_

 _Did Rosalie tell her everything?_

 _Should I offer my side of the story?_

 _Where is Rosalie?_

 _Will she ever forgive me?_

Bella began to dig through the drawers of the old looking desk, barely seeming to pay any attention to her Sire's question.

"Have you seen any stamps?"

I wished again in desperation that her mind was even half as telling as the rest of her coven, but still, she remained silent to me.

"Isabella, your sister, have you seen her?" He spoke a little more abruptly.

She hummed a sound of acknowledgment. "Yes, yes she went for a hunt."

She continued to dig, drawer by drawer, for her stamps, all the while a small white envelope dangled from her delicate fingers. I watched her move in rapture.

"Ugh!" She finally gave up, never finding what she was searching for.

"Did she say anything to you?"

She finally looked up at the broken sound of the Doctor's question. All facades of composure dissipated, in its place, a look of complete vulnerability, the likes of which I had never seen expressed by one of my kind, overcame him.

The two shared a lingering moment together-sad eyes meeting pleading ones.

She only remained still for a second before coming to comfort her Sire.

She fell into his arms without hesitation, not saying a word or needing to. There was utter forgiveness in her embrace.

Even I could see it.

A pang of something foreign tinged through my extremities. If I didn't know any better I might think it was jealousy.

I pushed the nonsensical through to the side quickly.

She pulled away from Carlisle, her eyes shining with emotion; leaning forward she placed a kiss on his cheek.

"I'm going to run to the post office and mail this letter to Jasper." She said before letting him go completely and headed back towards the door.

"Take Edward with you."

"What?"

"Excuse me?"

We both spoke at the same time.

"I think it would be a nice change of scenery for you Edward. And Bella can show you the importance of preserving the humanity we exist around."

"Do you really think that's the best idea, Carlisle?"

"Please, Isabella."

She shot her Sire one last long hard look before pivoting on her foot and sashaying out of the room without saying a word.

 _I would get moving if I were you, she's not one to be left waiting._

Without thought or reason to my own free will towards the situation, I blindly followed her path marked by the intoxicating smell of her being.

She was halfway down the driveway of the house when I caught up with her.

She moved at a languid human pace, her hips swinging from side to side in a way that made her shape underneath her dress very noticeable to me.

She said nothing as we made out way down the hill and to the main road of the small town.

My mind began to wander to the silence that screeched at me from between her ears.

Nothing.

The demon inside began to picture holding this girl down, snapping her neck from her shoulders and reaching my fingers up and into the top of her pretty head to see if anything lay beneath her chestnut hair.

By the time the fantasy had come and gone we were entering a small brick building outside of which an American flag blew in the wind of the rainstorm that was minutes from breaking loose again after a short reprieve.

With her hand on the door, she whipped her head around abruptly, eyes wide with blazing determination.

"Try not to act like a savage for ten minutes."

And then she was sweeping in through the entrance, the umbrella she had carried over her shoulder practically smacking me in the face as it slides shut behind her. I was left standing outside. As if on cue the skies broke open again sprinkling me with water that joined the vehement frustration seeping out of my every pore.

I stormed in after her.

She was already at the counter chatting pleasantly to a young man who was leaning so far over the countertop I thought he fall over it all together.

 _God, she's so gorgeous._

"And what can I do for you today Miss Bella?" He smiled brightly at her.

Feelings of rage began to ring through me. My hands balled into fists at my side.

 _She has to be the most beautiful little thing this side of Portland._

"Hi, Carl, just a book of stamps for me today. The flowers if you have them."

 _Darling, you can have whatever you want._

"Anything for you Bella."

By the time the boy had reached behind him to retrieve her stamps and turned around, I was looming behind Isabella, who's back stiffened as soon as she felt me behind her.

"Whoa!" The postal boy jumped as soon as he realized that I had practically appeared from thin air.

I watched through his mind's eye as he took in my commanding presence. I towered over his object of affection by almost a foot and in my black ensemble that matched my hungry eyes, I looked like a demon latched to the back of an angel.

The boy's heartbeat raced and my gaze fell to the thin skin of his throat. I leaned forward to get a better look at the appetizing site and came flush with the back of the small girl in front of me.

She reared back swiftly; throwing me off balance for the first time in my immortality breaking my concentration on what could have been my next meal while also putting space between our connected bodies.

"I'm sorry Carl, this is my… cousin… in from out of town. You'll have to excuse his behavior…he's…uh…European."

The boy swallowed deeply and my eyes jumped back to the movement.

"The stamps Carl?" Isabella spoke again, reaching out this time with her glove-covered hand, placing it on the boy's forearm.

This caused his eyes to finally stray from my face, to where she made contact with his skin.

A disjointed fantasy of naked flesh and moving bodies popped into his mind, a wishful image that he had obviously conjured up many times before.

Venom built up in the back of my throat and something akin to an alpha lion's snarl boomed off the four walls of the small post office.

Moving with an uncontrollable need to protect what my alpha mind had determined was 'mine', my arm wrapped around Isabella's waist, pulling her so she was flush once again with my front side, no room between us to move.

Her hands immediately flew to where my arm held her still, her fingernails digging sharply into my skin. At the same time, a small gasp escaped from her mouth responding in surprise at my abrupt movement.

I grunted but held her tightly still.

"I'm so sorry Carl," she threw a $20 bill down on the counter in front of the boy who's mind had gone blank with fear and whose eyes looked as if they might pop out of his skull at any moment.

Isabella pulled the stamps from his immobile hand and with a strength that I would have never expected from her small body, twisted out of my grip almost painfully.

She grabbed my hand and unceremoniously dragged me out of the postal building and away from the petrified man-child who seemed as if he was about to urinate over himself.

She pulled me out into the rain-soaked parking lot before flinging away her hold of my hand as if just touching me had burned her.

"Can you not act like an ape for just five minutes?!" She roared at me, hurling her hands up into the air like a mad woman. As if she controlled the skies, they opened wide and the once steady rain turned into a downpour, drenching us both in fat drops of water.

I openly stared at her as the cotton dress she wore became like a second skin to her body and pieces of her once perfect ballerina bun now splayed against the skin of her face, clinching to her cheeks like glue.

Her eyes were black with rage and famine. Her mind was still as quiet as a silent night.

What a beautiful juxtaposition.

"Are you going to say anything or just stand there?" She challenged me.

She should be careful, my bite was much worse than my bark.

"What would you like me to say?"

Her mouth practically fell open wide.

"You're impossible." She threw her arms up in the air once again, turned around and began walking through the sheets of rain, her umbrella long forgotten in the postal building behind us.

Without another word, I followed behind her, watching her hips sway back and forth with each step she took. The small purse she had wrapped around her bounced up and down against her moving body, protecting nothing but her precious stamps and the long forgotten letter she meant to mail inside form the rain that pounded brutally against us.

When we finally met the end of the long winding drive up to the clearing where the house sat, she stopped walking and whipped around to look at me. Not foreseeing this abruptly stop in my mind, I barreled into her small frame, grabbing onto her upper arms to steady her. It didn't go unnoticed by myself that our wet bodies were touching once again.

"Why don't you just leave us alone?" She stared up at me with sad eyes, all the anger having washed away somewhere along the walk from the post office.

Her dark irises flashed back and forth between my left and right eye, not sure which one to land on, the rain cascading down between us.

"I can't."

The heat that began to grow between us, where our wet cloth covered flesh touched, stirred something long forgotten inside of me, a very human reaction that would have been embarrassing if I was capable of such emotions. The ball of warmth in my side seemed to catch fire as we stared at each other.

My grasp tightened slightly as I began to draw her even closer toward me.

With the small movement, it was as if the haze that culminated around us shattered and she was suddenly ripping herself away from my grip with another surprising amount of force.

She stepped away from me and an involuntary growl rumbled through my chest.

The fire was back in her eyes.

"Don't ever touch me again."

With that, she turned and was gone from sight. I stood and stared after her, a wall of rain drowning me slowly.

* * *

 **A/N:** It's been a while. I hope this gives you a little faith and proves to be a good start to your week. I like to think these crazy vampires will keep me coming back, so don't despair too much over my absence. Leave me some love.


	15. Chapter 15

**"Can't be unlearned, I've known the warmth of your doorways. Through the cold, I'll find my way back to you. Oh please, give me mercy no more, that's a kindness you can't avoid! I want you baby tonight, as sure as you're born. You'll hear me howling outside your door"  
** \- _It Will Come Back_ , Hoizer

 **Chapter Fifteen  
BPOV**

* * *

I ran.

I ran so fast it almost hurt. The muscles in my limbs stung with a slow-growing burn that I hadn't felt in decades. The predatory survival skills I possessed, the heightened senses, the bullet-like speed, the inexplicable strength, it was all wasted on my lithe body.

Once a month I leaped through the air and landed on a doe, maybe a buck if I was feeling adventurous, easily sinking my teeth into its soft jugular with little effort. Sucking down the mediocre tasting sludge that I craved. For the rest of the days, I mostly wailed in my bed, my body contorting into inhuman shapes, the sounds emanating from my mouth like that of a demon, while other times squeaks of a mouse caught in a trap.

I wasn't a physical being.

But now I ran with purpose. To flee, to get away from the cloud of intense emotion that billowed around me whenever he touched me.

I could still feel where his fingers gripped onto my wet flesh, the bite of singed skin left behind. Warmth traveled through my whole body, lighting my frigid form on fire.

The world around me was a blur. I fell to my knees somewhere in the forest, the trees around me weaving in and out of focus. I skidded across the ground, my knees ripping up the mud where I landed.

I dug my fingers into the soaked earth, hoping to grip onto something tangible before I blew away in a cloud of smoke. The rain did nothing to cool me down; even though it did it's best to douse the raging inferno that crashed over me.

Totally out of control, my eyes slid shut in defeat. The animal inside took over, throwing her head back and letting out a piercing roar that seemed to shake the trees around her.

And just as quickly as it had all began, it was over.

I collapsed to the ground, knees giving out beneath me. Exhaustion rolled over me in waves as I found my way onto my back, my eyes squinting opening. The sky above me spun slowly into a swirl of grey tones, crying heavy teardrops of rain that landed against my skin in the most heavenly way as if I'd just been in the desert for weeks.

I blinked through the drops that dripped into my eyelashes and fell down my cheeks, pseudo tears of relief that I'd been waiting to cry for a century. I took a deep breath in, taking in the full-bodied scents of the earth that existed around me. A languid smile peeled up my face.

My mind slowly starts to turn, flowing unhurriedly through every piece of the day's events, from the moment I left the house, Edward following behind me. An answer to this-this reaction must be hidden somewhere in it all.

I had been out of control of this body since the day I woke up in it but never had I felt something quite like that.

I had cried and screamed and lay like a pile of flesh and bones in the attic, but this was different. It was raw and demanding.

"Euphoric"

The words slipped from my lips as nothing more than a whisper. A nugget of knowledge unearthed without warning.

My eyes slide closed once again and a small smile lay lazily across my face. My limbs tingled with a warmth that felt how I imagined someone would feel after a day spent lying in the sun. The afterglow radiated around me, sinking into my tired bones.

The image of Bernini's Italian marble statue of St. Theresa came to the forefront of my blank mind. The image of the statue I'd obsessed over in Carlisle's Baroque art books flooded back to me like an epiphany.

Her head thrown back, lips parted slightly as if to let out the groan of such vehement emotion that it couldn't be contained. Her hands gripped onto whatever surface she could find, riding out the wave of emotion that even Bernini depicted as toe-curling.

Along with this vivid image came Carlisle's words from long ago.

" _It's like being in the throes of passion with your lover, so entwined that you're not sure where they being and you end. It's like everything in the world is complete and you are left satisfied for at least a few moments. You are filled with something alive and warm, storing it deep within you."_

A crack of thunder rolled through the forest jerking me out of my warm and cozy glow.

Without the radiance, the atmosphere around me suddenly felt colder, darker and anything but divine. A brisk chill washed over me.

"Enough Isabella," I scolded myself as I rose from the mud impression I had made beneath me.

I began to run home, feeling sluggish and stupid. Every few minutes when the remembrance of the moment I screamed into the air and the electricity struck through me, I would shiver and then promptly deny those feelings with hateful words of idiocy for myself.

"Absolutely ridiculous. "

"What is?"

Without realizing it I was back in the foyer, dripping rainwater all over the hardwood, reliving the moment that we had dragged ourselves into the house after the unceremonious greeting of our new…guests.

Rosalie startled me out of my loop of mental anguish.

"Huh?" I stared at her blankly.

"You were muttering to yourself about something being absolutely ridiculous."

She approached me carefully like one would a wounded animal. Pulling the mud-covered satchel from around my shoulders, once she came close enough. I looked down at myself, finally taking in my ruined state.

"My god Bella, what have you done?" Her eyes gazed over me from mud-covered toe to rain-drenched head. "Carlisle said you just went to the post office for stamps. Did you meet a monsoon along the way?"

Stamps. Funny how a trip I had made hundreds of times suddenly became a trip that left me reeling in uncertainty.

I opened my mouth to answer her, but as soon as I did the taste of something familiar yet foreign landed there, clinging decadently to my taste buds.

It was him.

My eyes rose to the ceiling of the foyer. It took me no time at all to find him once I was paying attention.

"Bella?"

Rosalie grabbed me by the shoulders bringing my attention back to her concerned and beautiful face.

"Uh…I just decided to take a detour on the way home. I didn't much like the company I was with." My eyes slowly traveled back to the spot on the ceiling where I almost could feel the heat of him radiate.

"Yes, well now you're a mess." She commented tugging at a now ripped and stained sleeve on my dress. She sighed. "We'll have to say goodbye to this one."

I didn't care about the dress. And if I was being honest, I didn't care about Rosalie at that moment. My body was begging me to follow the natural pull I was feeling up the stairs and into the space that I knew best, knowing it was there I'd find a fire blazing.

"You spoke to Carlisle?" I tried to distract myself from the craving to follow that yearning need, a preposterous feeling.

I forced my eyes back to my sister who's brow seemed to furrow even deeper than it had when she saw the state of me.

She took a moment to answer.

"We passed each other as I was heading back in. He went to show…that woman our only decent hunting territory."

Rosalie was a bitter creature by nature. She couldn't help it. It was woven into her very creation. Formed from hatred and violence that ended her first life. She had worked hard to find some form of contentment in her stone body and never-forgetting-mind. Unlike my sparse and fading human memories, Rose was cursed with a strong recollection of all her mortal thoughts and feelings. Including the last few hours, she spent tortured nearly to death.

And while she had grown warmer and lovelier with each decade that passed, the bitterness always crept back in. I would find her looking in a mirror, sometimes for hours, just staring into her dark black eyes, her face contoured so severely by sour rage I could barely recognize her.

While Rosalie has always been one of my caretakers, I had never been able to be one for her. It was only our Maker who could pull her from her bitter stupor, wrap her in strong arms and bring her back from that dark alley.

The bitterness was rooted deep into her words and for a moment I had forgotten about the mysterious stranger in my bedroom.

I reached for her hand, wrapping my own around her porcelain skin.

"It'll be okay Rose."

She took a deep breath, her eyes barely able to meet mine.

"I just need some time to think."

I already knew what that meant. Days, weeks, sometimes years spent out of the house, away from her coven, away from her life…away from me.

"No. You can't go."

She still couldn't look at me. Her grip on my shoulders fell away and slowly landed at her side. She looked defeated as she stared at my feet.

"I won't go far. I promise. I'm just don't feel like myself and I need a moment to…to…hell I don't even know. But if I stay in this house for another second smelling their scents mixing with ours I think I'll vomit." Her voice was strong but her body stayed limp.

I tried to reach for her but she immediately took a step away from me.

"Will you be okay if I go for a run?" Her eyes suddenly lifted from the floor, pausing on mine before rising to the ceiling where I could practically feel the heat of his body radiating through the floorboards. "Leaving you alone is the last-"

"Go." I interrupted her without thinking about what that single syllable meant.

Me and him…alone.

She opened her mouth to protest but I quickly threw my arms around her, not caring that I was ruining her designer trousers in the process. I clung to her as she clung to me on so many days and nights as I lay in that attic bed.

"Promise you'll come back quickly." My voice had the smallest quiver in it, but I knew she could feel the desperation in my entire body that encased her. I would never be strong enough to keep her here, but if this was the best I could do, I would at least make an effort.

It took her a second but she finally gave into my pathetic nature and pulled me impossibly close, reciprocating better than I ever could.

"Always Bells."

We held on for another long moment before she finally pulled away.

She was out the door just a few seconds later, but not before pressing her palms to my cheeks and leaving a light kiss on my forehead.

"Don't put up with that Volturi's bullshit."

She wasn't gone for more than a second before my gramophone started up and a rough melody began to pound down the stairs.

' _Don't let it in with no intention to keep it…'_

My body moved without my mind's permission, slowly creeping towards the stairs.

' _Jesus Christ, don't be kind to it. Honey don't feed it, it will come back'_

I blinked and I was in front of my bedroom door. My hand reached up and touched the solid oak that separated me from the music.

' _You know better babe, you know better babe than to smile at me, smile at me like that'_

With one more deep breath, I took in his sweet intoxicating scent and pushed open the last barrier between us.

' _You know better babe, you know better babe than to hold me just, hold me just like that'_

He stood beside the gramophone, a record in one hand being examined closely by his dark eyes, his other delicately pinching one of my cigarettes between his fingers, the smoke snaking through the air around him.

' _Can't be unlearned. I've known the warmth of your doorways. Through the cold, I'll find my way back to you.'_

"Guests aren't usually accustomed to raiding their host's rooms and taking what doesn't belong to them." I took a step into the room feeling infinitely less confident than I appeared.

A devilish smirk came to his face but he didn't raise his head to look at me as he flipped over the strange album to review the other side.

' _I want you baby tonight, as sure as you're born, you'll hear me howling outside you door'_

"If you haven't figured it out already, I'm not ' _accustomed_ ' to much of anything. I believe your exact findings were that I 'can't act like an ape for more than five minutes'." He mocked my earlier sentiment after the debacle at the post office.

I fumed.

I quickly walked over to him and snatched the album from his pale hands. It was this action that finally prompted his eyes to snap up towards mine.

"Rule one about being civilized," I quickly moved over to the gramophone and plucked the strange vinyl from the plate. "One doesn't walk into a person's room without permission." I slipped it back into its sleeve and returned it to the dusty stack in the corner of the room. "One does not use things that do not belong to them."

I stomped back over to him, his eyes following me the entire way. "And one also doesn't take things without permission." I quickly pried the cigarette from his fingers and extinguished it in the ashtray on the desk.

When I was happy that everything was back in its place I stood back from him and crossed my arms, feeling accomplished and superior.

The feeling quickly disappeared when I saw that ridiculous smirk return to his face.

"Now tell me, Isabella, was that one rule or three?"

"Fuck you" I wasn't prone to swearing, mostly because Carlisle was old fashion and delicate when it came to what he called 'unsophisticated language'. It was only one of a few traits I picked up after decades with Rosalie.

Suddenly he was looming over me, his finger sliding underneath my chin, the overwhelming inferno that each touch he left on my skin sparked, was back with a vengeance.

He tipped my head back until we were eye to eye. His large figure encased me in his shadow.

"I wouldn't make promises that you don't intend to keep, Isabella. I am the guest after all."

Embarrassment, anger, shock…arousal all came in a dump of emotions. With some sanity, the anger won out by a hair.

I ripped myself away from his touch and stormed across the room, flinging the door open and pointing towards the hallway.

"Out! Now." I almost growled.

But he made no motion to move towards the door. He simply chuckled and turned back to my desk.

I watched, ashamedly fascinated, as he peeled Carlisle's jacket, now soaked with rainwater, off his body. The button-down underneath followed until he was left clad only in his thin black undershirt that seemed to cling to every muscle of his upper body.

My eyes followed his long slim fingers as they plucked another Lucky Strike from its crumpled packaging, letting it rest between his lips. With inhuman grace, he pulled a match from its box, struck it against the worn wood of the desk and brought the flame to the stick that dangled out of his mouth.

I'd been lighting Lucky Strikes for decades and letting them smolder to nubs in that glass tray. A small sting of remembrance in the smell of the unfiltered tobacco, the same kind my father smoked frequently, brought a small drug-like high to my otherwise grey bleak memoryless world.

But never had I thought to bring that small cancer stick to my own lips and inhale. Like most human experiences I assumed it wasn't physically possible for my dead body to endure. Perhaps the painful attempts at ingesting mortal food that left me hunched over, inducing my own gag reflex to bring it all back up from where it would sit undigested forever unless expelled from my body, was enough to make me never try anything quite like that again.

And yet here he was, inhaling the toxins into his corpse lungs like he was born to do it. As if a vampire's make up was venom, blood and cigarette smoke.

"Why do you hide away up here?"

His sudden question took me off guard. I jerked myself out of my frozen stance, which was still pointing out my open door.

"What?" Was the only reply that I could manage, feeling like I was staring at James Dean who had crawled out of his grave looking as dashing as he did in _Rebel With A Cause_ , just featuring a paler complexion.

He blew the remaining smoke out of his mouth before leaning back against my desk, his arms crossing over his chest. His eyes seemed to appraise me in my damp ensemble complete with wet hair still clinging to my face and mud caking my knees.

I felt filthy, not only from my state of dress but also in the way he observed me. His questions made me feel even more vulnerable for some reason.

I stormed passed him, feeling his eyes follow me as I went, and quickly pulled a warm sweater and skirt from my closet, along with a new pair of stockings.

I retreated to my bathroom where my loving tub looked more inviting than ever. But the thought of even stripping out of my clothes with him on the other side of the door made the sound of a bath run sour.

"What's wrong with you? You're a strange little thing you know that?" He began to talk to me through the door. I could almost feel his intensity radiating through the thin wood that separated us.

I tried to quickly redress myself and ignore the fact that I was feeling more exposed than ever. Not only had I never been in the same room as a man when I changed clothes, but especially not with one who simultaneous was poking and prodding at my mental insecurities.

A nagging voice that sounded uncannily like Carlisle ran through my mind.

" _Don't tell him anything…the more he knows the more he'll be able to use against you when they try to take you from your home, from Rosalie and from me."_

"What, suddenly the little suffragette has nothing to say? I find that hard to believe."

I didn't even have my stockings on when I ripped the door open only to come face to face with the magnificent beast, who leaned against the frame of the bathroom door.

I ran right into his chest of stone and quickly righted myself by taking a step back into the bathroom. But he didn't let me get too far. With the hand that wasn't still delicately holding his cigarette, he wrapped his fingers into the cable knit knots that made up my thick sweater, pulling me back towards him so close that I was quickly drowning in his warm tantalizing scent made even more delectable by the rich smoke that caressed at the hazy memories that lingered below the surface of my mind.

His black eyes tore through my wide gaze, reaching down inside me to a place I didn't know existed. That feeling of uncontrollable ecstasy began to bubble up quickly. What would I do with it when I was standing right in front of him and not alone screaming in the woods?

"Why can't I hear what you're thinking little suffragette?"

I didn't understand what he was saying, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway. A thick cloud of blurring arousal surrounded us making it impossible to think straight.

My body tingled, my mind ran blank, my throat felt scorched with a thirst I hadn't felt since I woke up in this world.

A strong, dark voice growled in the back of my subconscious, one single word.

' _Bite'_

But I was useless. A pile of flesh and bodies in his grasp he held so tightly that I was left just barely balanced on the tips of my stockingless toes.

Staring at him I could see his own emotions rumbling along the surface of his placid face. But underneath the façade of chiseled muscle and skin, termers vibrated through his body. His mouth parted as if to let the air we shared together to rest on his tongue. His eyes slid to slits as his face came closer and closer to mine.

My heavy eyelids slid shut allowing my other senses to heighten and vibrate with awareness. He smelled like heaven, something so familiar and yet otherworldly that my throat begged for me to lean forward blindly and take a taste. I could feel his fingers dig more harshly into the knots of my sweater, pulling me close enough for our bodies to barely touch. The sound of his harsh breaths in and out made even more stimulating to my ears as he moved closer to me.

I nearly jumped out of my fragile skin when I felt the tip of his nose press again the bottom of my jawline, just barely trailing along the surface of my face.

A breathy moan, that I had never heard emanated from my being until now, escaped into the air.

' _More'_

The dark voice spoke inside me again.

The feather-light touch of his nose continued along my jawline until his face was nearly buried into my damp pile of knotted hair. Just beneath my ear and above where my jugular veins pooled with thick stinging venom.

I didn't dare take a breath, listening, waiting in glorious anticipation for him to do anything.

"Isabella," he breathed in my name against my neck. It sounded like a desperate prayer to God and an oath to the devil all in four erotic syllables that turned my indestructible body into mush.

I collapsed into his arms that where suddenly there to catch me. He had released my sweater and his lingering grip on the cigarette that I briefly heard hit the floor.

In an instant, our bodies crashed together leaving an echo of stones colliding shuttering through the room. One arm gripped me painfully around the waist, practically hoisting off the floor, while the other weaved through my rain-soaked locks of hair until they found purchase at the roots, giving him enough leverage to yank my head back to a severe angle, allowing him to take the final plunge and bury his face completely into my neck. First, his nose than his lips took turns mapping out the area, tracing obsessively over the skin where Carlisle's bite mark remained on my skin.

His breath became ragged and desperate while small inhuman noises left my mouth in waves. My body lay limp in his arms, at his mercy to finish me off whenever he decided.

But suddenly he wretched his head away from my neck and after a long moment of nothing, my eyes snapped open.

My head was still held in it's impossible angle, but I had just enough of a view of his face to see he was suddenly infatuated with something I couldn't see…or hear.

My mind seemed to begin to clear without his face pressed against me and a more civilized voice from inside my mind replayed his question that had caught me off guard after exiting the bathroom.

" _Why can't I hear what you're thinking little suffragette?"_

I didn't get the chance to ponder that thought further when I was suddenly jolted fully back to reality by an intense and furious growl escaping from his tall looming form. The noise seemed to reverberate through the whole house and had I been in control of my own body at the moment, I would have flinched and moved away from the evil noise.

He had growled and roared before but this was something altogether different.

Just as instantly as he had wrapped me in his arms, I was falling to the floor, like the puddle of water that dripped off of me when I entered the house.

He was gone and I was left looking out the door of my attic room towards the dark stairway.

My whole body shook with that same ecstasy that I had felt in the woods, but this time an incredibly all-consuming burn pulsed through me painfully.

I gasped and doubled over, my forehead finding solace in the cool wood of the floorboards beneath me. My arms wrapped around myself as wave after wave of pulsing fire roared through me.

It only lasted a moment, but it felt like an eternity.

When the roar faded to a dull ache, something new began to boil up instead. An overwhelming certainly filled the space where a lingering hole of questioning had been opening up since this man in black swiftly entered my existence.

I rose to my bare feet as swiftly as possible and began to rush after him.

I hated Edward. I hated everything he made of and everything he made me feel. And I was going to make sure he knew exactly what this 'little suffragette' thought of him.

* * *

A/N:

 _Peeks from around rock where I've been hiding..._

I hope you're all still with me and as excited about this chapter as I was to finally finish it. I hope there's more to come soon! Things are heating up and I can't wait to take you with me on the rest of the journey with this story. Let me know what you think!


End file.
